Paul McCartney announces memory-rich solo album and eyes Beatles biopics

Paul McCartney is turning memory into strategy. The 82-year-old Beatle will release The Boys of Dungeon Lane on Friday, May 29, his first new solo album in more than five years and his 20th solo record, a set he has described as "rare and revealing glimpses into memories never-before shared."

The album is built around McCartney’s own past in post-war Liverpool. He has said the title comes from a lyric in "Days We Left Behind," which he called "very much a memory song," tied to recollections of Forthlin Road, Speke and the working-class streets that shaped him before fame. That makes the record more than a return to solo music. It is another pass at authorship, with McCartney deciding which details of childhood, family and early Beatles history should remain vivid in the public mind.

The project itself began about five years ago when McCartney met producer Andrew Watt for tea. McCartney said he found a chord he did not recognize, kept experimenting until it became a three-chord sequence, and Watt urged him to record it. That long gestation gives the album a carefully tended feel, with McCartney revisiting old material the way an archivist might revisit a box of photographs. The track list also includes "Home To Us," a collaboration with Ringo Starr that links the new album to the Beatles’ still-living center of gravity.

The release lands during a broader McCartney campaign of remembrance. On BBC Radio 2’s Tracks of My Years on Monday, May 25, he revisited the music that shaped him, naming Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, The Kinks, The Human League, Prince, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and John Lennon. He has also spent recent years returning to key moments in the Beatles legend through Peter Jackson’s Get Back, the documentary Man on the Run, the photography book 1964: Eyes of the Storm and the BBC’s McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass. Taken together, those projects amount to a sustained effort to organize the memory of the band while he is still able to frame it.

That same impulse is visible in McCartney’s interest in Sam Mendes’s upcoming Beatles biopics. He sat down with Paul Mescal, who will play him in The Beatles: A Four-Film Cinematic Event, and joked that Mescal "knew it better than I did" as they talked guitars and songs. Mescal has said he is learning to play left-handed for the role, and the four-film project, also starring Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, is scheduled for theatrical release in April 2028. For McCartney, the work now is not only to make new music, but to shape how the story endures after him.