1 Paul McCartney Disco Song Might Be About God
Nobody talks about it anymore, but Paul McCartney made a few disco songs during the genre’s heyday. One of these tracks might be about God. Given Paul’s past with The Beatles, that feels like an awkward subject to broach.
Paul McCartney’s disco song about God feels oddly servile
Wings weren’t the Bee Gees, but they dabbled in disco more than fans seem to remember. The most striking musical elements of “Silly Love Songs” are its yearning disco strings and horns. Elements of the genre also show up in Wings’ flamenco-inspired single “Goodnight Tonight.” Perhaps the most intriguing of the band’s disco experiments is “Listen to What the Man Said.”
On the surface, “Listen to What the Man Said” seems like an exhortation to follow authority. That’s an odd move from an artist once associated with the hippie scene! According to Rolling Stone, Paul wanted the song to be ambiguous. “‘The Man’ could mean God, it could mean many things,” he said. “It’s a good summer single.”
It’s interesting that Paul wrote a song that could be interpreted as being religious. After all, he was in a band that John Lennon proclaimed was “more popular than Jesus.” However, fans have often understood The Beatles’ “Let It Be” as a hymn due to its lyrics about “Mother Mary.”
A member of The Blues Brothers played on the disco song
In the 1976 book Paul McCartney: In His Own Words, the “Band on the Run” singer said that he recruited The Blues Brothers’ Tom Scott for “Listen to What the Man Said.”
“Someone said ‘Tom Scott lives near here,'” Paul recalled. “We said, ‘Yeah, give him a ring, see if he turns up, and he turned up within half an hour!’ There he was, with his sax, and he sat down in the studio playing through. The engineer was recording it. We kept all the notes he was playing casually.
“He came in, and I said, ‘I think that’s it,'” Paul added. “He said, ‘Did you record that?’ I said ‘Yes,’ and we listened to it back. No one could believe it, so he went out and tried a few more, but they weren’t as good. He’d had all the feel on this early take, the first take. So we’d finished the session, we just sat around and chatted for a couple of hours. I think what he plays on that song is lovely and that, overall, it worked.”
Paul McCartney’s ‘Listen to What the Man Said’ was massive
“Listen to What the Man Said” reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for a single week. The tune lasted on the chart for 14 weeks in total. It was one of a string of No. 1 singles by Wings.
The track appeared on the record Venus and Mars, which reached No. 1 for one of its 79 weeks on the Billboard 200. Paul later included “Listen to What the Man Said” as the opening track on the compilation Wingspan: Hits and History. That record reached No. 2 on the Billboard 100 and spent 14 weeks on the chart. If you want to become familiar with Wings’ catalog, Wingspan: Hits and History is the perfect place to start.
“Listen to What the Man Said” is the rare disco song that could get us all a little closer to the divine.
