I Used to Live For Music

A Shadow Hanging Over Me

You know it’s bad when Sir Paul McCartney says, “Don’t have no time to be a decent lover.”  Did he say it in life?  I don’t know, but he said it in a song, which is worse.  There’s a whole tabloid backstory to why he was feeling this way, but then when it was announced that he and Heather Mills would divorce sans prenup, I wondered if he had a Blood on the Tracks in him. He didn’t.  Paul is not Dylan and the sun is not the moon, and, apart from a couple of coded messages to John—“Too Many People” is prime Paul, with or without the message—he was not the scorched earth type.  But he did write this:

I've got too much on my plate
Don't have no time to be a decent lover
I hope it isn't too late
Searching for the time that has gone so fast
The time that I thought would last
My ever present past

For those of you who are not McCartney superfans, it is true that the path from “You Never Give Me Your Money” to “Wonderful Christmastime” is not entirely pretty, but it is also true that there are more great solo McCartney tracks than you know, and these lines would not be thinkable on a Beatles track.  Those tracks have all the time in the world.  Because the world is round, it turns you on—not a jaded sentiment.  “My Ever Present Past” is on an album called Memory Almost Full.  He thought the time would last, but tick-tick-tick.   The idea that McCartney, of all people, would have no time to be a decent lover is something I have trouble accepting, but that’s apparently what the missus was putting him through, so thank you for sharing.

Memory Almost Full came out in 2006, the age of the iPod, where the memory was always in danger of filling up, and we constantly had to delete, delete, delete, knowing where to look among the garbage and the flowers, even as we were listening to a band called Garbage.