Interview for NBC

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About the cover of “McCartney III”:

Paul McCartney: If it’s going to be called “McCartney III”, we could just have a “3”, a normal “3”. Or we could have roman numerals. And I thought “how else can you do a 3?”. And I thought of dice. And I’ve just thought that can do. But then the idea was, if it’s a real dice, it’s diagonal. So I thought, what if we have it on the edge. And I wanted to just say “McCartney” and have the dice. And so I rang up a great artist, a friend of mine, called Ed Ruscha, whose one of his specialities – he has many – is his lettering. So he actually did that lettering for me, and talking to him, I said “You know, we will have the dice” and we worked out it would have to be on its side to look like it looks. So he did it.

What do you listen to ? What music do you listen to ?

Everything. I listen stuff on Spotify, I listen stuff on radio. Just depends. I have a guy who actually sends me new music that just has been released. To keep me up with the modern taste, Jim !

About playing the trumpet:

I got asked if I could play trumpet on a charity thing for the Preservation Hall Of Fame. I played trumpet when I was a kid. I said “the only thing I know is The Saints… When The Saints…” And they said, “we are going to do that”. They sent me a track and I ended up playing trumpet on it. Yeah, that was for a charity for them, and I think, when it went online, it raised like nine million dollars!

Do you sometimes think about collaborating with other artists like Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan ?

Yes, I do. Sometimes I let it happen, I let it come to me. So if someone gets in touch and says “I’d like to work with you”, that’s more likely. That’s what happened with Kanye. You know, he came through the grapevine that he would be interested working with me. So I thought “whaou, yeah”, I’ll give that a shot. So, that was very interesting. Again, I didn’t really know I was making a song. I sat around going down doing ta-di-dou-di-da… It just went on for a couple of days. It was only two months later when I got a track sent to me. I didn’t think I had done anything, but suddenly I got sent 4-5 seconds. I liked that one, and I had to say “Am I on this record”. “That’s you doing that guitar.” They sped it up, so it wasn’t recognizable… But I don’t really think I’ll ring someone up. There was talk of me doing something with Bob Dylan, that I was quite sort-of into, but it kind-of fizzled down.

I don’t know if you remember, but you had sent me a couple of ideas you had for songs. And the thing… No, you did! I’m still feverishly looking for them, ’cause they were good. And I lost them. But they were good… Not that good, but good.

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