It’s really cool to not care, right? Turning your nose up to anything remotely sentimental and instead adopting a steely, hard-to-please persona. It’s all nonsense, really. Akin to the sort of behaviour you’d adopt at primary school, sitting next to a girl you fancy and instead of being kind, putting your fingers to your nose and telling her she smells.
Sure, we quickly grow out of that silliness, but the ingrained essence of that idea sticks around and mostly manifests itself in how we consume music. When asked if we prefer John Lennon or Paul McCartney, instincts kick in and tell us to say John straight away, and without deliberation, in the hope it portrays as complex and difficult to please.
I would like to use this article to do away with all that rubbish and hereby exclaim, I love Paul McCartney. And I love Paul McCartney because of his soft-centred, dewy-eyed and outrightly corny sentimentality. How do I know that? Well, I love what is undoubtedly his corniest song.
On Wings’ 1976 album Wings At The Speed Of Sound, McCartney released ‘Silly Love Songs’, which, if you can’t decipher from the title, is as playful and sentimental as anything he’s ever written. On paper, the idea of a song’s chorus being a duelled harmony of ‘I love you’ sung repeatedly is genuinely awful. But McCartney’s inherent charm makes it undeniably enjoyable. I was going to say it’s undeniably a guilty pleasure, but I don’t feel fucking guilty at all.
In defending myself, I would simply like to refer you to McCartney himself, who puts it as succinctly as I could try to. “The fact is, deep down, people are very sentimental. If they watch a sentimental movie at home, they cry, but in public they won’t.”
“We don’t like to show our emotions; we tend to sneer at that. And in the same way, people may not admit to liking love songs, but that’s what they seem to crave.” -Paul McCartney
OK, I get it, try as I may to convince you that embracing life’s sentimentality is worth it in some cases, I can somewhat understand if you think McCartney’s lyrics in this case are a bridge too far. But if you strip it all away, you’re still left with a mighty fine composition, driven by a typical McCartney-esque piano melody and bassline.
Plus, the vocal performance is truly one of his finest, even if what he is saying makes your skin crawl. It was captured in that sweet spot of his career, where the youthful zeal has peeled away, leaving a more considered and thoughtful voice, but still having that innocent essence.
Even my description of his vocals is corny, as this song’s orbit and all things discussed within it veer into the cringe. But so what? We are all, in one way or another, corny people ourselves, and we should allow ourselves to embrace that. And when we do, there’s no better track than ‘Silly Love Songs’ in which to do so. Even if it did feature on Glee – a fact I am trying every day to put in the back of my mind.