The Japan bust wasn't really the end of Wings since there were tentative plans to tour the U.S. in the fall, depending on how McCartney II did. Had Denny not quit/been fired and Columbia hadn't rejected Wings' Cold Cuts album in 1981, I think Wings may have continued in some form, maybe without Juber and Holly since there didn't appear to be any touring plans. Paul didn't actually acknowledge the end of Wings until Tug of War came out in 1982.
That was released in 2018. Nothing new here.
That was 18 months ago. Soon two holiday shopping seasons will have passed. The remastering of Back to the Egg was done four years ago. I suspect they've been shelved indefinitely until something in the marketplace changes. At this point it seems they will put any product out there before they release these albums. Heck, they even put out a book about the lyrics for albums that are out of print rather than release the albums themselves.
@moggy Just to be clear when I referred to "solo" I meant "post-Beatles" if that makes any difference.
Same here with Classic Rock where it's moved into the '90s so I guess I'm really talking about what was.
@toris A single release of "Maybe I'm Amazed" would have been competing with "Let It Be" and "Long and Winding Road" which is something record companies try to avoid. And maybe Paul was cognizant of establishing a reputation as a solo artist. Even though rock stars sang plenty of ballads, they really didn't want to get lumped in with the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck or Tom Jones.
This brings me to another frustration which is Paul's reputation as a recording artist over the last 25-30 years. He seems to have been in limbo as far as radio formats are concerned since 1990. He was never really embraced as an adult contemporary artist (maybe by design) and his last gasp on Album Rock radio was "Figure of Eight". Elton John and Billy Joel, slightly lesser talents in my opinion, seem to make a bigger splash when they tour or whatever. They're certainly more prominent on Classic Hits radio. Both the Classic Hits and Classic Rock formats have been stuck on just "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "Live and Let Die" for many years now. I feel like everything Paul does seems to harken back to the past somehow, especially the Beatles, and it's like his whole solo career has been slowly disappearing like the people in the photo in the movie Back to the Future.
P.S. I'm referring to radio in the U.S., would be curious to know what it's like elsewhere.
My number one frustration is the slow pace of the Archive Collection releases, the lack of archival live recordings and just the general state of his back catalog. The fact that some of his catalog is out of print is a disgrace. Forget about waiting until next year or the year after that, here are the releases that I believe we should already have in hand:
Archive Collection releases of London Town, Back to the Egg, Cold Cuts, Give My Regards to Broad Street, Press to Play, and the Flowers in the Dirt B-sides on CD.
Things that would be nice to have but we'll probably never get:
At least one unedited full show from each tour from 1972 to 1993 on CD and a one or two CD set of soundchecks from 1989-93.
Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen have been cranking out dozens of multi-disc sets of outtakes and live recordings along with regular releases of new material for years now, why can't Paul do the same?
@b-j-conlee said in Paul McCartney- New Album for 2023:
@victor
Thanks for all info on "Hot Hits and Cold Cuts". Only living in the US, I don't recall hearing anything about "Hot Hits and Cold Cuts"
If you have the time, what was the track list going to be for that possible album? I would think there were plenty of rumors. Thanks
The good news is that Paul is aware of all this unreleased material and its quality and wants to get it out. I think the Archive Collection is the vehicle for doing that. I don't mind the songs being spread out over multiple releases as long as its the same format and mastering, then I can just assemble a collection myself. The problem is we're still waiting for tracks that were supposed to be released on an LP 40 years ago. That's the point of frustration for me. And I'm afraid time is running out on the CD format.
@b-j-conlee Like you, I have a great appetite for unreleased music and some of these songs are really good. Paul has even said that some of these songs are better than what ended up on the albums. Unfortunately, whether its the artist or the record company, there is very real resistance to releasing this type of material. Whatever the reason was that a song didn't make it onto an album or was relegated to a B-side way back when, the artist may still maintain that same reasoning today. And I think record companies think unreleased material must be sub-par in some way. Paul has said that new releases always bump this type of album off the schedule. I can think of numerous examples (Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, George Harrison) where somebody somewhere just couldn't bring themselves to fully release outtakes or B-sides even when that was the intent.
Let's consider "A Love for You." This was going to be on the Hot Hits - Cold Cuts album in 1975. That was going to be a stopgap album between Band on the Run and Venus and Mars and even had an Apple catalog number assigned to it. For whatever reason it didn't come out and Paul has hinted there was some record company resistance to it. Then in January 1981, Wings' final work was to put the finishing touches on this track and others for a Cold Cuts release that year. I guess Columbia Records wasn't thrilled about an album with tracks that couldn't even make it onto Back to the Egg. Once again, in 1986, Paul had Richard Niles do more work on the tracks but it still didn't get released, this time supposedly because a bootleg came out.
So these tracks end up coming out in dribs and drabs. If archive editions of London Town and Back to the Egg would just come out, you could assemble your own Cold Cuts. We're only missing five tracks: "Waterspout", "Robber's Ball", "Cage", "Did We Meet Somewhere Before?" and "Same Time Next Year." Actually we already have the last one on CD but I prefer to have everything with the same mastering.