Paul McCartney on vegetarianism and immortality

The world is finally coming around to the fact that Paul McCartney shared equal billing in the creation of the Beatles legend. “He’s about the only one that I’m in awe of,” Bob Dylan said of McCartney in a recent interview. “He can scream and shout as good as anybody, and he can sing a ballad as good as anybody. And his melodies are effortless… that’s what you have to be in awe of.”

On Memory Almost Full, McCartney shares in that wonder with tracks that celebrate his now legendary status from the perspective of a scruffy kid from Liverpool. “That was me, in the cellar, sweating cobwebs,” he sings on a track that reads like a spirited flip through a photo album. “When I think that all this stuff can make a life, it’s pretty hard to take it in.”

Memory Almost Full comes on the heels of a string of brilliant new McCartney recordings—2005’s critically acclaimed Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 2006’s Ecce Cor Meum (a concerto that deals with the grief of losing his wife Linda to cancer) and Twin Freaks—the hard-to-find collection of mashed-up and remixed McCartney classics that pre-dates The Beatles Love and Yoko Ono’s similarly-conceived Yes I Am a Witch by two and three years respectively.

Tracks like “Gratitude,” “Dance Tonight” and “You Tell Me” show what this maestro is capable of achieving when he strips away the veneer, lets his guard down and pours his heart into a song.

Paste: The new issue of Paste, which coincides with the release of your new album, is titled ‘Can Rock and Roll Save the World.’ So I guess that’s my question to you. Can rock and roll save the world?

Paul McCartney: I think it has (long pause).

How so?

I dunno. I was just winging it there (laughs).

No. I think it has. To me it speaks of freedom of thought and individualism. And when we’re all thinking, we can save the world. So in some ways, I think rock can save the world and in other ways it already has. It’s helped, put it that way.

In 1998 you said “if anyone wanted to save the planet all they need to do is stop eating meat.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

Yeah. Well, one problem that is bound to affect this planet is overpopulation. We’re not going to get less people on this planet, or so it looks. So then the problem becomes how to maintain this planet and yet have so many people. And if that is a true fact that you can feed twenty times the amount of people by you know, being vegetarian—which is something I’ve been over thirty years—then I think that’s the sort of valid avenue for people to explore. And I think that now there is even more of an argument for going veggie than ever before. Because if you take things like An Inconvenient Truth, you see it’s the little things that are screwing up our nest. I hope that’s not mixing too many metaphors.

You’re the first artist to appear on the new Starbucks Hear Music label. That’s sure to raise a few eyebrows. It’s quite a non-traditional approach to distributing music.

Yeah. I’ve become a bit disillusioned with, uh, the major record labels and the way they operate. I think they themselves are going through problematic times and my friend and producer David Kahn said they were a bit like the dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid, and that really struck me. We’re in a new world now so the idea is that music isn’t bought traditionally through record shops anymore. I mean, this has been happening for years. I’ve known for years that my records have been selling in Best Buy and Walgreen’s while Tower Records is closing. So you see this shift.