Andrew Watt Talks About Making Paul McCartney’s “The Boys of Dungeon Lane”
The producer discusses how McCartney led him to The Rolling Stones, how he wants to make records as a fan first, and all the lessons he learned from the Beatle.
Welcome to the 20th edition of Out & Back, my newish newsletter about music and whatever else. If you haven’t subscribed yet, I’d be honored if you did. And please share, if you’re into that sort of thing. A few updates: For Pitchfork, I have a review of the great, great Ted Lucas box set on Third Man. For Liquid Music, I wrote about listening to Rafiq Bhatia’s album Environments and the way it caused me to think about being outdoors. And speaking of being outdoors, my wife, Tina, returned Tuesday from a climb of Denali, the highest mountain in North America. She’s chronicling the expedition here, and I am both exceptionally proud of her and pretty fucking glad to have her home. I will have more to say about it when she’s good with that. Thanks for reading, and I’ll have a conversation with Flea about Jeff Parker later this week.
I was 2,000 words into my Mojo cover story about Paul McCartney—which I had started in the morning and was due that very night—when Andrew Watt finally called. Watt produced McCartney’s very good new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, and we had been playing phone-tag for a few days. I’d missed our original call, because I was on tour with a band in Texas when two phone chargers conspired to die simultaneously; he’d missed our second slot late that night, because he was busy preparing his studio for McCartney to come back over the next day.
But when we finally connected, my hope that he would become a major if last-minute addition to the McCartney piece was quickly affirmed. “Ask me anything you want,” he said early on, before proceeding to gush about Macca’s musicianship and mentorship at every chance. Watt was funny and candid and self-deprecating as needed, truly in awe of the notion that he was being asked about a record he had made with a Beatle.
My relationship with Watt’s work with elder statesman is complicated. I often liked the alchemy he had on Ozzy Osbourne’s Ordinary Man, but I despised his work on The Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds so much I got at least one death threat. (I was walking across America at that moment, so I was not worried about being easy to find.) I like, however, what I’ve heard of his new work with The Stones, and I think he nailed The Boys of Dungeon Lane, a very nice balance of the past and present that feels like a real McCartney record, not some in-the-box fabrication. Hearing Watt talk, I could understand how they got there: sheer enthusiasm and camaraderie.
I paced around a Las Vegas parking lot as Watt and I spoke, then got right back to writing. Here’s that short and lively conversation, almost in full. You can get the Mojo issue with McCartney on the cover here.
I hear you were in a session yesterday—maybe with Paul? Tell me about it.
It’s like everything happens for a reason. It’s almost better that we’re talking today, because we just did the playback for about 40 fans last night at my studio. It was incredible. They brought in fans from all over, and they didn’t know what they were coming for. They were brought to the live room of my studio and in walked Paul and I and his wife, Nancy. They lost their minds. We sat in between two speakers, and Paul explained every single song. We riffed back and forth. He talked about the record-making process and told Beatles stories and stories about his family and growing up and memories. Every fan, their jaws were dropped. They were crying, clapping, cheering. It was beautiful.
What struck you most about the record as you heard it again last night?
The musicianship. This is all taste, right? Like, this is what you do for a living—talk about your music taste and how you feel, right? It’s the same thing with producing and writing; you go towards your taste. So with my taste, I believe there are three all-time greats, on the Mount Rushmore, that could produce everything themselves, engineer everything themselves, write everything, and play every instrument—true 100 percenters. Let’s see if you can guess them.
Well, I’m guessing Paul McCartney is one of them, given that we’re talking about him. It’s not a member of the Rolling Stones. [Laughs] Prince is possibly on the list. And Stevie Wonder?
How’d you do it? You did it. You’re the first person to ever get them all in one fell swoop.
Hey, I’m doing my fucking job. I’m so proud of myself today.
So there’s three people for me. I mean, there’s plenty of other people who do it brilliantly as well—Lenny Kravitz and Beck, right? But, like, we’re talking about the originators of that thing: Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. So when I was sitting there listening to this record, I had an out-of-body experience. I just went back to every YouTube video I ever watched of him talking about his music and his process, and then I realized he was discussing the work that we had made together. I was listening back to it and the musicianship—his choices on the drums, his bass playing is fucking out-of-this-world, right? It’s just not even to be believed, his bass playing, his melody choices, his lyrics, his guitar playing, his tones, his every instrument.
I have never made an album before with someone where they were playing every instrument, and it’s just remarkable what he’s able to do. I asked him how he’s able to do that in front of everyone last night. He said really such an enchanting thing. Instead of sitting there and trying to tell someone else, “No, no, it goes like this. No, no, do it like this,” you just do it yourself and then you know the way the song goes. You know what the drum part’s supposed to be, what kind of groove you want. You’re just beating yourself up to get it right. It was such a cool way to think about it. When you have the ability to do it, you just do it yourself. You know what you want the parts to be. There’s no one else that can do that.
Let me ask a biographical question, because there is some confusion about this: Did you first work with Paul while making Hackney Diamonds with the Stones, or is it the other way around?
Paul is actually the reason why I got the job to be the Stones producer. Don Was had introduced me to Mick during the pandemic to help with the mix of a song. We had tea together once, and he told me he was going to talk about me to other people—to Keith and everything. I was waiting to hear about that, and then I got a call from Mick saying Ronnie Wood had dinner with Paul McCartney. Paul said he worked with this great producer named Andrew Watt, and we should give him a try. Ronnie said to Mick, “We should get that guy Andrew Watt.” And Mick said, “I was already talking to him.” Paul really put me up for that.
Paul and I met soon after I had won the Producer of the Year Grammy. His manager, Scott Rodger, and I met through Sharon Osbourne and kept in touch. He knew how big of a Paul fan I was, so he put us together to have a cup of tea at my studio. I remember my assistant having to smack me in the face because there was going to be a Beatle in my kitchen. I couldn’t comprehend that thought.
How did you start to square with that reality?
The night before he was coming over for the first time, in 2021, I woke up in a sweat remembering that I only had right-handed guitars. Even though I’m a lefty, I play right-handed. We were only supposed to have tea, but I said to myself, “What if for some reason he wants to play a guitar? And I don’t have a guitar for him? And then he can’t play the guitar? And my chance to ever play guitar with Paul McCartney and fucking finally learn how he does that thing in ‘Blackbird’ is gone?” In the middle of the night, I found a rental company that had a Rickenbacker bass, a Höfner bass, an Epiphone Casino, a Martin D-28 from 1969, like all his stuff, because I’m a McCartney freak like the rest of us. Sorry, Elton John will not stop trying to call me while I’m on the phone with you. He just keeps calling over and over—like four times already, sorry. [Laughs]
I just hit the Internet hard and wrote my assistant who helps me with this kind of stuff. I said, “We need this, this, and this, and I’m going to sleep. Make sure it’s at the studio.” It was in some fucking weird city in California, and we got it all. We were having tea and just talking, and it was really sweet. And he says, “You know, you can write a song from anything.” He went to grab a guitar and was like, “Oh, it’s right-handed.” I handed him the left-handed guitar, and then he played this really weird chord. He’s like, “Sometimes I just pick a random chord I’ve never played before and go from there.” So he played this weird chord and smiled with this boyish charm and had to resolve the chord because it was hanging out there so fucking weird. He moved his finger down two frets, and it resolved. I grabbed a guitar and played a third chord, and we were off.
I asked Paul a question about this origin story, and he didn’t know. What chord was it?
It’s the first chord that you hear on “As You Lie There.” It’s got a D string ringing through it. I can tell you the notes in the chord if I think for one second. It’s got a D, then the fifth fret of the G string, which would be a C. It’s got the fourth fret on the B string, which would be an E flat, and then a B on the top. And then he moved his finger, his pinky, down from the B to the A. He played a G triad after that, with the D still ringing. [Plays the progression on a guitar] Once he did this chord, it was like, “There’s a fucking song.”
When do you realize that you and Paul are actually making a record, that you’re going for it?
Never, which was what was so awesome. There was never any pressure. We made this album over the course of four years, and there was literally never a conversation of “This is an album” until, like, maybe the last six months of the process. We became friends, which is the most beautiful thing ever. We went out to dinner last night, and we just had a great time. He and I just started this kind of friendship and played. He would have a week here in between a tour or a trip or a film he was working on, whatever he had going on. He would say, “I have these 10 days here. Can we book some time and keep going?” Every time, I said, “Of course.” We did some sessions at my studio. We did some sessions at his studio in Sussex, which has all the Beatles gear.
I heard about your fascination with the Studer four-track tape machine Paul has in Sussex.
Oh, yes. You go to this place in Sussex where his studio is, and you can see France from the window. It’s in the countryside, and every instrument is from the Beatles. It’s like, “Oh, there’s the spinet from ‘Because,’ the harmonium from that song, the Mellotron from ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ the Casino from ‘Taxman,’ the Höfner, and the fucking D-28 with the Wings sticker just sitting in the corner.” It’s too much to handle.
It’s a working museum.
All of his tools are there. I had the most profound moment of my life there, which I will never forget. I didn’t have my phone with me, but I didn’t need to, because it’s in my brain. At his studio, he houses all of his masters. Everyone has this conversation now about masters and what it means to own your masters. They’re digital files today on hard drives, so maybe you have 10 hard drives holding the master. This man has been making popular music for 60-something years. I walk into this room with him with all of these physical albums that he has made. I see him surrounded by his life’s work. It was like looking at Picasso in a museum with all of his paintings. It was just un-fucking-believable. We pulled out Band on the Run and opened up the session notes. He had this drawing he did of how he wanted the mix to sound—vocal in the center with the little face and then a guitar to the left and another guitar to the right and the bass in the center and the drums behind it. He built a picture of how he wanted the mix to sound.
Anyway, we were in his studio, and he’s showing me around. He showed me the Studer four-track, and he explained to me that all the Beatles music was recorded on these four-tracks. Do you understand that process? For anyone that doesn’t, they should understand that “Sgt. Pepper’s” was made on a fucking four-track. Take that song: Paul and Ringo get put down to one track, the bass and the drums. Those parts were bussed together, so that gets those two tracks to one track. You have three open, right? The guitars get put down; they have to be played, then they get bussed down. The singers sing, and those have to get put down to one track and mixed correctly and can never be changed again. The entire fucking orchestra is on the last track. [Note: I believe Watt is talking about the song’s French horns here, not just the tuning orchestra that opens the track.] It’s something that’s not to be believed, what they did with four tracks. Everyone had to be good enough to do that. Paul told this story last night about George Martin. He used to record these orchestras, and the phone would ring in the studio. They’d say, “OK, George, we’re putting the needle down,” and then the orchestra would play. Paul asked George once, “What if they made a mistake?” And he goes, “They never make mistakes.”
And this old technology feels like a new frontier for you?
I had never gotten to make music like that before. I fiddle around with mixes ’til I’m fucking blue in the face, and then I want to change them again and then I want to change them again and then I want change them again. The idea of committing to a sound and playing the part perfectly was so exciting to me. And to watch Paul do that on the same tape machine he made “Sgt. Pepper’s” on? I produce from the front row. I produce as a fan. I wanted to hear Paul McCartney make a song on that machine with that sound. As an exercise, we wrote something together. We sat there with guitars and diddled around. And then he got on the drums, and I played guitar. We put it down like that. Those two things became one thing, and then he put the bass down. Everything had to be committed to. We mixed it on the console and printed it within 24 hours of doing it. That was it—never changed again.
Paul talked to me about the desire to push forward. You obviously didn’t make this whole record on a four-track, which means the options for what you could add are almost limitless. How did you navigate that?
It’s a really good question. Did you listen to the album? Does it sound new to you?
It does. It feels like it nods to the past, but it doesn’t feel anchored to it.
My job as a producer changes with whoever I’m with, right? There’s albums I make where I’m writing every single song, leading the way. And then there’s albums I make where I am just following. And you follow Paul McCartney wherever the fuck he wants to go. I mean, he’s Paul McCartney, so he’s leading every step of the way. I’m just listening and reacting to what he’s doing. The choices we made and the production that we chose was very song-based. It’s all over the place. There’s synths on the record, drum machines on the record, and then there are songs with just a guitar with no reverb or anything.
The idea of him being him was very important to me. I don’t want you to listen to a Paul McCartney album and be like, “Hey, he sounds like Post Malone now!” They have the same initials, but we don’t want them to sound the same. I just felt that he is truly the greatest living musician. There’s nobody that can play the instruments like he can. I wanted that to be able to be heard on these recordings. I didn’t want to cover it up with a bunch of endless production and reverb and schmutz. We sat there, and we mixed it ourselves. It’s mixed modern. It’s mixed loud. It bangs when it needs to. When it needs to rock hard, it rocks hard and has a big sound. It doesn’t sound like the ’70s. But I have been to so many Paul McCartney concerts, and I see what happens when he plays “Jet” or “Band on the Run.” If he’s going to write songs like that, we’re going to produce them with live instruments, you know?
We’ve talked about Paul’s six decades of work. Something I find so endearing about it is that he’s often sounded his age, that he is not trying to be this young guy. How did you foster that here?
“Days We Left Behind” is in his great songbook of all the songs he’s written, one of his classics. He really struck a nerve there and really, really reached inward. Every time I hear that song, even last night in front of the fans, I want to cry. I’ve cried to it with him staring at me, saying, “Don’t cry. What’s wrong with you?” It just does something to me. A song like that, you wouldn’t want to hear drum machines on that song. That song is guitar, piano, harmonium, voice, and bass. It doesn’t call for a bunch of stuff; it calls for the man playing those instruments and baring his soul.
I love the song “Life Can Be Hard,” which I believe predates you two meeting. Paul wrote it during the pandemic. What’s your first memory of hearing it?
Once we were in the studio together, we had five or six songs that we really liked. He said to me, “You know, I have some other songs that I’m really liking that I put down at my studio.” We listened through a bunch of music together, and that was one of my favorites. I instantly heard that song and loved it because it’s so McCartney. He writes these things on the guitar or the piano, and the melodies are just baked into his chords. It was just a little guitar and his vocal, so we recorded it that day. We were doing the drums for it, and I love his drumming, because it’s super quirky. He tried a couple different versions and wasn’t really feeling it. He came back in the control room, and, without thinking, I just played “Rocky Raccoon” for him. He hadn’t heard the song in a minute. And the drumming on that song is so quirky and starts and stops and has fills in weird places. It’s reacting to the vocal. He was like, “OK, I got it.” He went out and did the drums in one take.
I could talk to you about this all day, but I fear Elton John will not wait. Congrats on making this record.
It’s a dream of a lifetime. I got to work with Paul McCartney. Honestly, if I leave you with anything, I feel our relationship was like teacher-student. I’d go in there, and he’d be teaching me about playing an A major to F#, and then you’re going to hit a D chord. But put the A7 in between the F# and the D chord as a transition chord. And, oh, if you move this finger while you’re playing a G chord, it becomes this. He was teaching me always. Or watching him arrange background vocals with the guitar around his neck and wanting a third and then a fifth and like doing out the background vocals or playing drums and hitting the cymbals quieter than he hits the snare so that when he compressed the drums the way he wants the cymbals didn’t hurt you? It was years of mastering the craft. To get to learn all that stuff from him and take it with me, unbelievable.
Once again, you can snag the entire issue of Mojo with my McCartney profile here.
These inisghts into McCartney's creative process are terrific.