Paul Mccartney Finished About 20 New Songs For Next Project
By: Howie Edelson

Paul McCartney is hard at work on material for his next project, telling The Los Angeles Times that he's already completed "about 20 new songs." McCartney explained that his songwriting process isn't much different than the way he and John Lennon crafted the Beatles'legendary hits, saying, "I do it in the same form that John and I used to do. There's a spot in my house. It's like my den. There's my piano and my acoustic guitar. The piano is the old one that I wrote 'Let It Be'and 'Hey Jude'on, so it's an old friend of mine. A good old friend."

McCartney went on to say that he's comfortable performing the Beatles'masterpieces live in concert around the globe: "I enjoy playing the old songs, and some of them, like 'The Long And Winding Road,'have new things for me. What it means to me here and now, from this perspective, when it has been a long and winding road for me, well, it's so different. When I wrote that song, it already had been a long road, you know, from my youth up to that point. We were going through quite a lot. But now I look back and that song . . ."

He went on to say, "In truth, a lot of them mean new things to me, I hear stuff I didn't hear in the past. I remember roughly what I meant when I wrote them and sometimes they surprise me."

McCartney says that throughout his life, whether it be while mourning the loss of his mother when he was 14, the murder of Lennon in 1980, or most recently during the breakup of his second marriage, music has been a constant positive outlet for him: "I think one of the great things is that music is a great healer. And it's a great therapy, and often when you're going through something difficult, and as you can imagine without me laying too fine a point -- this last year's been pretty difficult -- to get into your music is a great thing. So I think the last couple of years, I've been very glad that to have my music. And I think consequently I've just been putting stuff into it that seems to have added up to something."

Last year, McCartney's latest experimental album under the Fireman moniker, called Electric Arguments debuted at Number One on the Top Independent Albums Chart.

On Friday (April 17th) McCartney will perform in Indio, California at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival at Empire Polo Field. On Sunday (April 19th), he'll perform in Las Vegas at The Joint.

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