When Paul McCartney announced his new album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, he revealed that, during his first meeting with producer Andrew Watt, he played an unfamiliar guitar chord that proved to be the jumping off point for the whole project.
“While playing around on the guitar during the meeting, Paul happened upon a chord that even he – the world’s most successful living songwriter – didn’t recognise,” said a press release. “Undeterred and driven by his experimental nature, Paul carried on changing one note, then another, until he had a three-chord sequence – which Watt suggested they should record.
“This session yielded the album’s opening track, As You Lie There.”
Now, following the album’s release, McCartney has been discussing that chord in a little more detail in a new video, in which he also demonstrates how he played it on an acoustic guitar.
“So, I’ve got a little story here about a chord you might like,” he begins. “I was due to meet Andrew Watt for the first time at his studio in LA. I went down there, and we had a cup of tea, and I was chatting and talking about music. And I said, ‘Sometimes I like to start the idea for a song with a wacky chord – a chord I don’t know. Sometimes that inspires me and gets me into a song.’ So, he lent me a guitar – a left-handed one – and I played the wacky chord, and I’ll show it to you now.”
Breaking down the chord, McCartney says, “These notes are D, C, Eb and B,” before adding that, for his next moves, he changed the B to an A and then to a G.
“So it became a three-chord sequence,” says Macca, before strumming through the progression a few times.
Given its importance to The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’s development – and the fact that it’s the first thing you hear on the album – you might have thought that McCartney would have worked out the name of his chord by now, but he suggested on Instagram that he still doesn’t know and would like someone to tell him.
“What is it?” he asked. “Do you know the wacky chord?”
Well, we’d say that it’s a Cmmaj7/D (followed by a Cm6/D, resolving to G/D), though you could also make a case for it being a D13b9 (followed by D7b9 and then that G/D).
Either way, you can hear it on As You Lie There, The Boys of Dungeon Lane’s opening track.
Reaction to McCartney’s new album has been broadly positive, with four- and five-start reviews pretty much across the board. It’s also been praised by a certain Taylor Swift: reacting to the release of The Boys Of Dungeon Lane on Instagram, she wrote that she’s “Never not inspired by this eternally exceptional artist.”
