The new black

Yet another colour to collect

Yesterday, a new colour to collect of the infamous upcoming “McCartney III” album: Orange. The colour is available from Universal Music stores in USA and U.K. (we haven’t bothered to check other countries). Also, a couple of songs from the project have started to appear online among traders, due to their inclusion in a recent “Breakfast With The Beatles” radio broadcast in USA. They are tracks 2 and 11, “Find My Way” and “Winter Bird”/”When Winter Comes”, respectively. The latter one is a “Flaming Pie” outtake, recorded the same day as “Calico Skies” and “Great Day” in September, 1992, which explains why Paul’s vocals are back in shape. Interestingly, the track was co-produced by Paul and George Martin.

As you know, the release date has been knocked back a week, and “McCartney Legacy” explained why, courtesy of inside information from Capitol:

Long story short, Capitol is unable to manufacture the (many different variations of) vinyl on time, so they have knocked back the release date by a week. Capitol, we are told, did not expect a McCartney album this year, and have been scrambling to fulfill Paul’s wish that the album finishes the sequence 70-80-20.
Vinyl sales will make up a big portion of physical sales in the UK and USA giving Paul the best possible chance of a No.1 album, hence he wants all physical media to land on the same day. (Paul faces stiff competition from the Arctic Monkeys and The White Stripes.)
We were also told to expect a big deluxe edition in 2021, plus other marketing gimmicks in the coming weeks. We were told months ago that Paul prepared 25 tracks old and new, so it’s possible we’ll get more in the super deluxe. (Some tracks date from before 2020, ‘When Winter Comes’ for example was recorded in 1992.)

We have to say, that we are quite unhappy with the situation. Paul went overboard with the “Egypt Station” release and its many incarnations, for instance the suitcase edition we all thought was the ultimate and would contain everything was followed by yet another single release. But this one seems to really take the cake. So he has 25 tracks available for the project, we get 11 tracks initially and he is probably going to spread them out over several releases after Christmas. We can not say for sure whether or not the four “secret” demos spread over four differently coloured CD releases are included in the 25, though (a new Japan-only release seems to include all 4 of them). Anyway, we think this is cynical exploitation of the collectors’ completist genes.