Paul McCartney’s new album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane is being acclaimed as his best work for 20 years or more – and McCartney himself says that some of the credit should go to his producer Andrew Watt.
Speaking to MOJO magazine, McCartney admits that when he and Watt first met in April 2021 at the producer’s home in Los Angeles, he had some minor reservations about working with him. But as the project developed, these reservations disappeared.
McCartney recalls: “I came away from the first session thinking, ‘Well, I like him, but he’s a bit pushy.’ But pushy’s not a bad thing in a producer. It’s just enthusiasm from someone who wants to keep making this record. It’s infectious.”
McCartney also makes a telling comparison between The Boys Of Dungeon Lane and the albums that Watt has made with the Rolling Stones.
“If you’re working with the Stones, they’ve got the Stones sound,” he says. “It’s kind of the opposite with me – we’re trying not to do that.”
It was McCartney who recommended Watt to the Stones via a dinner with Ronnie Wood. Watt subsequently worked on the Stones’ 2023 album Hackney Diamonds and recently completed the band’s forthcoming follow-up Foreign Tongues, due for release on 10 July 2026.
McCartney tells MOJO that The Boys Of Dungeon Lane was conceived with a forward-thinking mindset: “The way we approached this album was, ‘We’ve done that before. Let’s do it different.’”
That said, in the making of this new album McCartney also made use of various items of vintage gear previously used by The Beatles during sessions at Abbey Road Studios in the ’60s but since installed in McCartney’s home in Sussex. These include the harmonium he played on The Beatles’ 1965 single We Can Work It Out and a Studer 4-track tape machine utilised in the creation of the classic Sgt. Pepper finale A Day In The Life.
The latter was especially intriguing to Andrew Watt, who tells MOJO: “I wanted to hear Paul McCartney make a song on that machine with that sound. The idea of committing to a sound and playing the part perfectly was so exciting to me.”
Watt also explains how McCartney would give himself the challenge of beginning the process of writing a song by playing a random chord to see where it led him.
For his part, McCartney says he remains, at the age of 83, endlessly fascinated by the creative process.
“Music is more intriguing than we know,” he says. “When you break it down scientifically, it’s just frequencies, which sounds very boring. But it’s amazing how these frequencies can come together to make notes, chords, songs, anthems, ballads. It’s magical.”
