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Overall, the new album is good McCartney—clever, varied, full of humor —but it is nothing to match his past pop classics, particularly Yesterday, Michele and Hey, Jude. His lyrics are best when least pretentious, as in Junk, a kind of sentimental word jamboree: "Bye, bye, says the sign in the shop window/ Why, Why, says the junk in the yard." Maybe I'm Amazed, however, is a pale echo of the choral sumptuousness of McCartney's The End, which served as the coda to Abbey Road, the hit 1969 Beatle album.
Anyone who reflects sadly that one Beatle is bound to be less good than four may draw some encouragement from recent history. Last year reports of Paul McCartney's death—and replacement by a double—helped stir enormous sales for Abbey Road. Reports of the Beatles' death will certainly not do McCartney —or that upcoming LP Let It Be—any harm in the world's record shops.
If there are appropriate words to describe the situation in all its delicate imbalance, perhaps they can be found in the Beatles' own lyrics for Hello, Goodbye:
You say yes, I say no.
You say stop, I say go, go, go.
Oh, no.
You say goodbye and I say hello, hello, hello