Paul McCartney has made peace with the fact that the Beatles and all his accomplishments will always be rooted in not only his past — but his present, too. While talking to The New York Times ahead of his upcoming album, McCartney III, which drops on December 18th, “Macca” spoke of how he deals with his “Fab” history, explaining, “It’s like your high school memories — those are my Beatles memories. This is the danger: At a dinner party, I am liable to tell stories about my life, and people already know them. I can see everyone stifling a yawn. But the Beatles are inescapable.”
He went on to say, “My daughter Mary will send me a photo or a text a few times a week: 'There you were on an advert' or 'I heard you on the radio.' The thing that amazes me now, because of my venerable age, is that I will be with, like, one of New York’s finest dermatologists, and he will be a rabid Beatles fan. All of that amazes me. We were trying to get known, we were trying to do good work and we did it. So to me, it’s all happy memories.”
McCartney is proud of the new McCartney III set, with one song already raising eyebrows, as some are heavily suggesting it's an unflattering ditty about his ex-wife, the infamous Heather Mills. McCartney said, “'Lavatory Lil' is a parody of someone I didn’t like. Someone I was working with who turned out to be a bit of a baddie. I thought things were great; it turned nasty. So I made up the character Lavatory Lil and remembered some of the things that had gone on and put them in the song.”
He went to say, “I don’t need to be more specific than that. I will never divulge who it was.”
Paul McCartney admitted that his past figures in quite heavily when working up new material: “Y'know, you reference most things you do either to, 'Would that work with the Beatles? Would this be a good Wings song? Would John (Lennon) like this?' Y'know, 'What would George play on this?' — and stuff. I think you do that. I often think of John.”