Paul McCartney is heading back to where it all began. The Beatles legend has set a May 29 release for his first solo LP in more than five years, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, a deeply autobiographical effort inspired by the quieter, formative moments of his Liverpool childhood.
Billed as the nearly 84-year-old McCartney’s most introspective work to date, the Andrew Watt-produced album revisits his pre-Beatlemania years in post-World War II Liverpool, drawing on memories of family life, working-class resilience and his earliest musical friendships with John Lennon and George Harrison.
The project’s emotional center is lead single “Days We Left Behind,” which McCartney says is “very much a memory song for me. The album title, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, comes from a lyric in this track. I was thinking just that, about the days I left behind and I do often wonder if I’m just writing about the past but then I think how can you write about anything else? It’s just a lot of memories of Liverpool. It involves a bit in the middle about John and Forthlin Road, which is the street I used to live in. Dungeon Lane is near there. I used to live in a place called Speke, which is quite working class. We didn’t have much at all, but it didn’t matter, because all the people were great and you didn’t notice you didn’t have much.”
However, the album isn’t exclusively backward-looking. Alongside its autobiographical sketches are a set of new love songs in McCartney’s familiar melodic style. The Boys of Dungeon Lane began taking shape five years ago following an informal meeting with Ozzy Osbourne/Rolling Stones producer Watt. What started as a casual songwriting session sparked by an unfamiliar chord progression McCartney stumbled upon eventually grew into the album’s opening track, “As You Lie There.”
From there, the record came together in fragments, recorded between tour dates in Los Angeles and Sussex with no label-imposed deadline. McCartney played most of the instruments himself in a nod to his 1970 solo debut, McCartney, and its two sequels from 1980 and 2020.
Today’s announcement coincides with McCartney’s run of underplays at Los Angeles’ Fonda Theatre tomorrow and Saturday, which sold out in a matter of seconds.
Here is the track list for The Boys of Dungeon Lane:
As You Lie There
Lost Horizon
Days We Left Behind
Ripples in a Pond
Mountain Top
Down South
We Two
Come Inside
Never Know
Home to Us
Life Can Be Hard
First Star of the Night
Salesman Saint
Momma Gets By
