“You Do Miss Them. I Start to Get Very Sad.” — Paul McCartney on Grief, Memory, and His New Album
This week, Paul McCartney put out his 20th solo album, *The Boys of Dungeon Lane*. Fourteen songs. And somewhere in the middle of making it, the memories caught up with him.
The album is not a nostalgia piece. It is not a tribute record. It is something rarer: a reflection on what it means to carry the past while still moving forward. McCartney wrote and recorded much of it at his home studio, but the songs kept drifting back to Liverpool. To the early days. To the people who were there.
There’s a song called “Down South.” It’s just about three teenage boys hitchhiking — Paul, George, John. Two of them are gone now. He told *The Guardian* that he gets very sad thinking about it. The song is not maudlin. It is not sentimental. It is simply a memory, set to music, of a time before anyone knew their names.
Then he stops himself. He remembers something — everyone misses them, not just him. And that, oddly, makes it a little easier to carry.
“I’m not the only one,” he said. “Millions of people miss them. Every day. That doesn’t make the sadness smaller. But it makes the loneliness smaller.”
There’s another song too, “Forthlin Road.” It points to a small house at 20 Forthlin Road in Liverpool — the room where he and John first sat down with two guitars and started throwing ideas at each other, bouncing back and forth. He still remembers exactly what John said to him there. And what Paul said back.
“He said, ‘We should write together.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, okay.’ That was it. No grand plan. No vision of the future. Just two kids in a living room.”
The album is filled with such moments. Glimpses. Fragments. The kind of memories that don’t arrive as complete stories, but as feelings — the smell of a room, the sound of a voice, the way the light fell on a particular afternoon.
McCartney is 84 now. He has outlived his bandmates, outlasted trends, and outwritten nearly every songwriter of his generation. But he has not outlived the grief. He has simply learned to carry it differently.
“You do miss them,” he said quietly. “I start to get very sad. But then I think about all the people who loved them. And I realize I’m not alone in that room. None of us are.”
*The Boys of Dungeon Lane* is available now. It is not a happy album. It is not a sad album. It is an honest one. And in that honesty, McCartney has given his fans something rare: a glimpse of the man behind the legend, still missing his friends, still writing about them, still keeping their memory alive — one song at a time. 🎶❤️💔
