Paul McCartney Album "Should Be Ready By the Summer," Morello Record Also Due

Just seven months after the release of Memory Almost Full, Paul McCartney is already brewing up a new album. According to his publicist, "Paul started recording last week, but he has been writing for a while. It should be ready by the summer." McCartney is reportedly working with producer Youth, a founding member of the band Killing Joke and the producer of albums such as the Verve's Urban Hymns and, in some capacity, Guns N' Roses' long-delayed Chinese Democracy.

Not to be outdone by McCartney's prolificacy is Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who released his first solo album as the Nightwatchman in April 2007. Despite touring as both a member of the reunited Rage and as a solo entity, a second solo album is already near completion, with the working title of The Fabled City in place. While no release date is set, Morello expects the album out later this year.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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