How critically and commercially successful has Paul McCartney been since leaving the Beatles? The following countdown of his four best albums doesn’t include six additional platinum-sellers.
Also finishing outside the “Big 4” of Paul McCartney albums were eight other gold-certified LPs and five subsequent international Top 5 hits. Interestingly, only one dates back to his era-defining tenure leading Wings in the ’70s.
“Starting from scratch after the Beatles felt crazy at times,” McCartney admitted to Rolling Stone. “There were some very difficult moments and I often questioned my decision. But as we got better I thought, ‘OK, this is really good.'” Every one of their seven albums together went gold or platinum.
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Wings was particularly successful in America, where they sold more than six million LPs over the five years between 1973-78. “The times with Wings were exciting because we built up to it and eventually we hit the big time,” McCartney told the BBC. “There was a particular kind of excitement in achieving that goal.”
McCartney had initially faced a wave of criticism after leaving the Beatles. His post-Wings albums could be hit-and-miss. But albums made away from Wings make up the rest of the “Big 4.” They range from a late-career triumph to early in his solo career, when McCartney was at his most creatively free.
Some of the most interesting work emerged after he and Linda McCartney moved to a farm on Scotland’s Kintyre peninsula. “I was in the middle of this horrendous Beatles breakup, and it was like being in quicksand,” McCartney said in the 2012 Ramming documentary. “And the lightbulb went off one day when we realized that we could just run away.”
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The music they made was very different than what came before, setting the stage for McCartney’s solo induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “There was no attempt made to compete with the things he had already done,” Neil Young noted at McCartney’s induction ceremony. Unfortunately, that wasn’t necessarily what listeners wanted to hear.
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“I think people were expecting something more sort of Beatle-like and I was purposefully digging my heels in saying, ‘We’re not gonna do that,'” McCartney later admitted. “Just like an imitation of the Beatles? I didn’t feel like that was a good way to go.”
He was right. In time, projects that were once panned by critics and fans were finally reassessed. Two of them, in fact, are part of the “Big 4” of Paul McCartney‘s albums:
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He’s had so much post-Beatles success that this list doesn’t include six other platinum-sellers.
Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
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