Paul McCartney Once Said Working With Kanye West Reminded Him of John Lennon
Paul McCartney’s closest collaborator was John Lennon, and he once said that working with Kanye West brought him back to those Beatles days. McCartney and West worked together on songs like “FourFiveSeconds” and “Only One.” While the creative process between the two of them felt slightly new, McCartney said there was a quality to it that reminded him of Lennon.
Paul McCartney said working with Kanye West reminded him of John Lennon
When McCartney and West worked together, he played guitar while West seemingly sat by, distracted.
“I was tootling around on guitar, and Kanye spent a lot of time just looking at pictures of Kim on his computer,” he said, per Variety. “I’m thinking, are we ever gonna get around to writing?!”
McCartney realized that this was all a part of how West worked. He listened to the guitar and built songs off of it.
“But it turns out he was writing. That’s his muse,” McCartney said. “He was listening to this riff I was doing and obviously he knew in his mind that he could use that, so he took it, sped it up, and then somehow he got Rihanna to sing on it. She’s a big favorite of mine anyway, so that just came without me lifting a finger.”
Upon reflection, McCartney said this was in some ways similar to how he worked with Lennon.
“When I wrote with John, he would sit down with a guitar. I would sit down. We’d ping-pong till we had a song,” McCartney told The Sun (per Time). “[Working with West] was like that.”
Paul McCartney said an artist like Kanye West could never replace John Lennon
McCartney has worked with a number of artists over the years. While he likes the collaborative process, he didn’t think anyone would be able to replicate what he had with Lennon.
“I don’t think it could be,” he told Rolling Stone. “At some point, you have to realize, some things just can’t be.”
Unlike his other collaborators, he and Lennon had the benefit of growing up together.
“John and me, we were kids growing up together, in the same environment with the same influences: He knows the records I know, I know the records he knows,” he said. “You’re writing your first little innocent songs together. Then you’re writing something that gets recorded. Each year goes by, and you get the cooler clothes. Then you write the cooler song to go with the cooler clothes. We were on the same escalator – on the same step of the escalator, all the way. It’s irreplaceable – that time, friendship, and bonding.”
He spoke about their collaborative process in The Beatles
McCartney described the “ping pong” process he employed with both West and Lennon.
“Writing with John was a lot easier because you’ve actually got a sounding board,” McCartney said on Fresh Air. “You’re sitting across from someone and we normally wrote on two acoustic guitars. So he’d be sitting there, I’d be sitting here and one of us would suggest an opening line. And then the other one would go okay and would make a suggestion for the second line. So you would kind of ping pong.”
He said it made the songwriting process much easier.
“If a line was terrible, the other person would say that’s terrible and we’d scratch it,” McCartney said. “So just with that process of the two of us making this piece, it was quite easy. I don’t want to make it sound too easy but it made the process very enjoyable and easy. If you had a line that you were questioning in your own mind, if you were writing on your own, you could spend a good half hour going, ‘This is terrible, what can I do, think of something quick.’ Whereas with John, you just go, ‘Oh, this is terrible.’ He’d go, ‘Yeah, I know’, and we’d fix it. Between the two of us we would just improve it so it was easier.”
