Date: May 20, 1978
Weeks: 2
Time seems to have largely forgotten Wings. It will most likely be remembered as a historical footnote in Paul McCartney's musical career, overshadowed by both the Beatles and his solo work. I'm not sure I've really heard a lot of Wings songs before. And if they're all like this, I hope I won't hear any again.
When I saw in the video that they had two synthesizers back to back, I braced myself. In this era, synthesizers just weren't ready technology yet, and most people didn't seem to know how to put them to good use. Fortunately, somebody here was canny enough to understand that synthesizers are not good replacements for any instrument, but that they can create a unique and interesting sound on their own. That's a synthesizer used correctly. Too bad the lesson was subsequently lost for most of the 80s.
Despite using their synthesizers correctly, this song fails to provide enough additional instrumentation to create an interesting song. There's no lead guitar, just a bass. The drums are minimal. And there's not really anything else happening. The song feels sleepy and unenergetic. The video includes an audience doing a pretty tepid dance. There's also something about the chord progression in the chorus that makes the song feel a bit like a TV theme song. Actually, I can pinpoint exactly which TV theme song. It's this one. Which is, of course, Billy Joel's "My Life," a better song because it features a piano instead of a synthesizer. So it's got a weird mixture of low-energy verses with a bit of a bright, upbeat chorus.
Paul McCartney does what he can with the vocals. I actually like near the end of the song when he opens up and lets his voice get a bit raw and gravelly. It's the only part of the song that seems to include any emotion. The backing vocals and even McCartney's own performance in the verses seems to lack that emotion, though. It's kind of like he tried desperately to save it at the end, but it's definitely too little, too late.
The lyrics do little to discourage my interpretation of this song as a generic TV show theme. "With a little luck, we can help it out. We can make this whole damn thing work out." Which thing? Well, whatever the TV show or movie is about. The common interpretation seems to be that Paul and Linda McCartney's lives were a bit chaotic at the time this song was written. They were in a band together, on your traveling the world, raising 3 children, and a 4th was on the way. So this was Paul's way of telling Linda they could make it all work, as long as they had a little luck. With all that extra knowledge about what was going on in their lives, it makes it a little easier to appreciate the sentiment as something that really did apply to them specifically, instead of being the generic song it appears on the surface.
My research also indicates that a longer album cut of the song had a fair amount of radio airplay, so I gave it a listen as well, just in case the longer song included more interesting content. The bulk of the extra content seems to be some additional freestyling on the synthesizer. I actually kind of like that section, because the synthesizers are free to be more wild and interesting. There's more interesting music happening when the constraints of a song are removed, if that makes sense.
I also have to comment on the video. I realize that music video was in its infancy, and even something as simple as this performance video was pretty novel at the time. But the dancing is just so tepid and bored that it doesn't exactly sell me on the song. McCartney's lip-synching is pretty terrible, too. At the end of the song, he's not able to visually recreate the emotion in his voice. I don't want to pick on the video too much, but it's not giving me any additional enthusiasm for the song.
My verdict: Don't like it. It's not terrible, but the synthesizers just aren't as fascinating as they may have seemed at the time.
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