10 Underrated Albums By Legendary Rock Music Bands

From the minute that the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney was never really that comfortable being a solo artist. The Cute Beatle always thrived on having someone to work off of in the studio, and even his first real solo outing with RAM listed his wife Linda alongside him for how much she contributed to the record. After Wings had started to go through a little bit of turmoil in the late ‘70s though, Paul wanted to step away from the traditional way of making records, and out popped McCartney II.

Whereas McCartney’s first real solo album was made more or less at home and sounded like a glorified demo tape apart from Maybe I’m Amazed, this record goes for a much more homemade feel as well, being mostly Paul experimenting with different electronic sounds in his home studio. While there are still some great songs that could have been Wings tracks like Coming Up, there’s a certain nervous energy that comes with these songs that put them more in the new wave category, almost in the same league as bands like Talking Heads around the same time. Paul’s gift for melody hasn’t left him either, turning the primitive sounds of synthesizers into something absolutely beautiful on the song Waterfalls.

The rest of the album is a lot more caustic though, defying the trends of the time by having Paul experiment with his own voice and making songs that are either grating on Temporary Secretary or disappearing in the mix altogether on the instrumental songs like Front Parlour. While this may have been a bit divisive at the time, the album did have a fan in Paul’s former partner John Lennon, who got back into making music after hearing Coming Up on the radio at the time. This may not have been meant as a mainline Paul McCartney project, but it’s probably the closest we’ve come to hearing what makes Paul tick musically.