Paul McCartney has been everywhere recently. From his headlining tour of America, to his appearance on Saturday Night Live and he was Stephen Colbert’s last guest on the Late Show. Now comes his late-career triumph, “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” a surprisingly great, deeply personal solo album.
The 83 year old rock icon has unsurprisingly recorded most of the instruments and vocals himself and many of the songs evoke a nostalgic journey back to his childhood roots in Liverpool. Dungeon Lane is the road he used to take to get down to the shores of the Mersey to escape his lower class neighborhood.
The album crosses musical genres going from acoustic balladry to arena-ready rock and roll. The emotional highlight for most Beatles fans is the reunion with Ringo Starr, their first collaboration of one of the other’s albums since 2010,
Time has made his once supple singing voice more fragile but that adds to the album’s sentimentality. The Boys of Dungeon Lane proves that McCartney’s unmatched gift of melody and words remains brilliantly intact.