Paul McCartney Signs to Label That Rejected the Beatles

Sir Paul McCartney performs at Yankee Stadium in New York.

Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Paul McCartney has been signed to Decca Records nearly 50 years after the label famously rejected the Beatles, claiming that the group had "no future in show business."

Decca has partnered with McCartney to release the score of Ocean's Kingdom, his first ballet. The production will make its debut at the New York City Ballet's fall gala on September 22nd. The record is set to hit stores in England on October 3rd.

Photos: Never-Before-Seen Beatles Pictures
In an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, McCartney said that the work is "basically a romantic story" about a couple from opposite worlds – an ocean kingdom, which represents purity, and an earth kingdom, which represents darkness and evil.

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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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