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In 1975 and 1976 Paul McCartney and Wings undertook the epic "Wings over the World" tour, the largest scale tour they would ever undertake as a band. From this tour came both the legendary "Wings Over America" triple live album and the concert film "Rockshow," which are both now available restored and remastered. Learn more |
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Product Details
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Track Listings
| 1. The Song We Were Singing |
| 2. The World Tonight |
| 3. If You Wanna |
| 4. Somedays |
| 5. Young Boy |
| 6. Calico Skies |
| 7. Flaming Pie |
| 8. Heaven On A Sunday |
| 9. Used To Be Bad |
| 10. Souvenir |
| 11. Little Willow |
| 12. Really Love You |
| 13. Beautiful Night |
| 14. Great Day |
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Just when everyone has given up on Sir Paul's ever releasing another decent pop song, he turns around and surprises us all with his best album since the mid-'70s. After working on the Beatles' Anthology series, he was reminded of the standards of music he'd long forgotten and was pressed to meet them. Even Jeff Lynne, who helped on much of it, kept himself very much in the background, and let Mac do the right thing, playing and singing most everything, with some help from Ringo and guitarist Steve Miller, whose presence was a mixed blessing. Even if the songs don't scale the heights of the Glory Years, they remind us of the true talent that was McCartney once again. A pleasure to the ears. --Chris Nickson
Product Description
U.K. edition of his new album featuring earlieravailability and the single 'Young Boy'. 14 tracks total.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
65 of 76 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Trite or not, cruel or not, James Paul McCartney creates better under stress and in emotional pain. Only months after this CD was released, the new Knight Bachelor lost the only woman he believed he'd ever love. Surely, even though the press was being assured Linda was "fine", she wasn't, the fact of her illness was informing his work.
Just as "McCartney" was created during the hazy period he was trying to define himself after the Beatles, and "McCartney II" surfaced after his jail experience in Japan, "Flaming Pie" shows a more vulnerable, less cheeky McCartney, and with good results.
Unlike a lot of Wings albums, or "Tug of War" or "Pipes of Peace", this album doesn't just yield one or two songs for the "It's got a beat AND you can dance to it!" crowd. Instead, the lyrics reign here, introspective, haunting at times.
Not that some of the songs don't rock! How could they not with Jeff Lynne and Steve Miller helping out? Even fellow Two-tle, Ringo, helps out with Beautiful Night. But since it's his voice in addition to drums, that's an element of sentiment, not one of quality.
The unusual production of some cuts, like the Victrola in "Souvenir", reminds one of the days the Beatles were experimenting with all kinds of sound at Abbey Road.
My one disappointment about this CD happened a couple years after its release. "Little Willow" shows up here, dedicated to a friend who'd died of cancer and her children. Only a bit of detective work would reveal that this friend was Maureen Starkey, Ringo's ex-wife, and the kids Lee and Zak. But after Princess Diana was killed and a memorial album put together for her, the song Paul "donated" in her memory was...."Little Willow." This was puzzling, maybe even disturbing.
Seeing beaming Sir Paul stroll in pictures with his new wife Heather and baby Beatrice, one can't help but feel happiness for him. But I must confess, sometimes I wonder if a bit, just a bit, of stress or hardship could come his way to promote that creativity; nothing major, just a stubbed toe or lost set of keys or something. Because he hasn't recorded anything as good as "Pie" since.
Oh, if you're wondering...Beatleoligists will remember that when John Lennon was asked to write in "Mersey Beat" how the Beatles got their name, and wrote, "A man in a flaming pie came and said, 'You shall be Beatles with an 'A'". So the name is a nod to John, and to the Beatles...of whom McCartney just may be the biggest fan.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
By Tom Emanuel
Format:Audio CD
In the mid-to-late 90s, many things were happening in Paul McCartney's life. One of the most important was his involvement in the massive Beatles Anthology project, both instigated by and contributing to the resurrection of 60s and 70s nostalgia in the 1990s. Another was, his wife of almost thirty years had contracted breast cancer. Both of them knew she would not last but a couple of years. It was primarily these two influences that came together on 1997's Flaming Pie.
It's safe to say that Paul McCartney has never made a record as mature, as poignant, or as personal as Flaming Pie since leaving the Beatles. Driven both by the Anthology and (more importantly) Linda's impending death, it finds Paul at his most intimate and introspective, looking back down the years across his incredible life and career. From the title itself (a reference to John Lennon's story of the Beatles' "origin") and waltzing nostalgia of the very first track (The Song We Were Singing), this record is a celebration of Paul's past. This imbues upbeat songs like Calico Skies and Young Boy with a rainy-day melancholy, and the plaintive ballads (quite possibly Paul's finest) with a sense of inextinguishable hope and rebirth. Two of the latter, Somedays and Little Willow, heartbreaking tributes to Linda in retrospect, stand head and shoulders above almost anything McCartney has ever done - including the Beatles.
Also, Flaming Pie finds Paul combining his personal troubles with his penchant for beneficial collaboration. More than half the album is co-produced and supported by the phenomenal Mr. Jeff Lynne, mastermind behind ELO and producer for the likes of Tom Petty and George Harrison. Longtime friends Ringo Starr and Steve Miller also make appearances (as does Paul's son James on guitar), and Sir George Martin lends his genius to a few songs, making Flaming Pie one of his final projects. And even if a few duds managed to slip through the cracks (the bluesy jams Used to Be Bad and Really Love You with Steve and Ringo/Jeff, respectively), for the most part it's solid, twenty-four-carat gold as only Paul McCartney can mine it.
Flaming Pie closes on two seemingly disparate but perfectly complimentary songs: Beautiful Night and Great Day. The former is an orchestral epic ala Abbey Road, a grand culmination of all Flaming Pie's ingredients; the latter a simple, touching folk song from the days of the original McCartney album in 1970, a last loving duet between Paul and Linda. And that sums it up nicely, I believe. Only Band on the Run can topple it.
It's safe to say that Paul McCartney has never made a record as mature, as poignant, or as personal as Flaming Pie since leaving the Beatles. Driven both by the Anthology and (more importantly) Linda's impending death, it finds Paul at his most intimate and introspective, looking back down the years across his incredible life and career. From the title itself (a reference to John Lennon's story of the Beatles' "origin") and waltzing nostalgia of the very first track (The Song We Were Singing), this record is a celebration of Paul's past. This imbues upbeat songs like Calico Skies and Young Boy with a rainy-day melancholy, and the plaintive ballads (quite possibly Paul's finest) with a sense of inextinguishable hope and rebirth. Two of the latter, Somedays and Little Willow, heartbreaking tributes to Linda in retrospect, stand head and shoulders above almost anything McCartney has ever done - including the Beatles.
Also, Flaming Pie finds Paul combining his personal troubles with his penchant for beneficial collaboration. More than half the album is co-produced and supported by the phenomenal Mr. Jeff Lynne, mastermind behind ELO and producer for the likes of Tom Petty and George Harrison. Longtime friends Ringo Starr and Steve Miller also make appearances (as does Paul's son James on guitar), and Sir George Martin lends his genius to a few songs, making Flaming Pie one of his final projects. And even if a few duds managed to slip through the cracks (the bluesy jams Used to Be Bad and Really Love You with Steve and Ringo/Jeff, respectively), for the most part it's solid, twenty-four-carat gold as only Paul McCartney can mine it.
Flaming Pie closes on two seemingly disparate but perfectly complimentary songs: Beautiful Night and Great Day. The former is an orchestral epic ala Abbey Road, a grand culmination of all Flaming Pie's ingredients; the latter a simple, touching folk song from the days of the original McCartney album in 1970, a last loving duet between Paul and Linda. And that sums it up nicely, I believe. Only Band on the Run can topple it.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good thing he did that Anthology project, cause this album is the beginning of Paul's best string of solo albums.
November 1, 2007
Format:Audio CD
The beginning of McCartney's later day career renaissance
Bob Dylan in a recent interview has said there's really only one person in music today that to him is absolutely stunning. That person, naturally, is Paul McCartney. ""I'm in awe of McCartney. He's about the only one that I am in awe of. He can do it all. And he's never let up... He's just so damn effortless." (Taken from a Rolling Stone interview from summer 2007).
High praise from someone so iconic as Bob Dylan. The last ten years for both McCartney and Dylan have proven them to be the most interesting artists of their generation currently recording. Over the last decade, both Dylan and McCartney have had a massive resurgence in their careers. While each are following their own idiosyncractic paths, both have proven themselves to have remarkable fertile songwriting during this stage in their careers.
And here's the trick. Both are the best at what they do. Sure, you can't imagine Paul McCartney being able to pull of the effortless aural history lessons in songs Dylan has been doing, each steeped in the American tradition and that "Old, Weird, America" of the Anthology of American Folk Music. Come on, could Paul really write "Nettie Moore", "Ain't Talkin'", "Mississippi", "Things Have Changed," "Tell Ol' Bill", or the masterpiece "Cross the Green Mountain"? But then again, you can't see Dylan writing the effortless melodic pop masterpieces McCartney written in FLAMING PIE, DRIVING RAIN, CHAOS & CREATION IN THE BACKYARD (one of my favorite albums of the 2000s), or MEMORY ALMOST FULL.
When FLAMING PIE hit the stores in 1997, four years separate it from McCartney's previous studio offering, OFF THE GROUND. A lot happened during those four years, namely, The Beatles multi-media project THE ANTHOLOGY. The ANTHOLOGY was a massive undertaking, resulting in three double albums of outtakes, a massive coffee-table book that really is one of the definitive resources for us Beatles nuts, and then the hours long documentary as well. Anything like that may get you thinking McCartney would really be in a reflective mood about mortality and unusually somber. Well, not really (the somber, reflective McCartney would come out in his 2005 masterpiece CHAOS).
Instead, according to the liner notes, the Anthology project would be a refresher course on how to construct a well-made song. And FLAMING PIE is full of such songs. According to Wikipedia, "McCartney sporadically recorded the entire album in a space of two years, working not only with Lynne, but with Steve Miller, George Martin, Ringo Starr and his own son, James McCartney, who plays lead guitar on "Heaven on a Sunday". "Calico Skies" and "Great Day" both hailed from a 1992 session, recorded even before Off the Ground had come out." McCartney recorded the album in the space of two years.
The album is really a return to the basic sensibilities that produced records like MCCARTNEY. The music, while carefully considered, doesn't get bogged down in rather pretentious production styles. It's carefully produced, but the music has much more of a live feel to it. While there are a couple of sore spots (the collobaration with Steve Miller always strikes me as generic 1970s rock), this is an album I find myself returning to again and again. It's that good. "Flaming Pie", the song, is just a basic rock and roll song, and while it's drawn from the Lennon story about the man on the flaming pie telling him in a dream they shall be The Beatles with an A, the song's one of the poorer ones on the record. But the rest is great, whether it's the Beatles send up "Song We Were Singing" (one of Paul's best, and just makes you smile), his refletive ballads, or just gorgeous orchestration. McCartney has always been amazing with melodies, and this record has it in spades.
Buy it. The last ten years have made both Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney extraordinarily more relevant than you could hope for if you followed their careers in the 1980s (especially Dylan). And don't worry. McCartney only gets better from this starting point in his discography. Make sure you pick up his other studio albums post dating this - there just as good, and in some cases (CHAOS), better.
McCartney has proven himself to be truly remarkable, and he has released some of his strongest music of his solo career in 1997-2007. He has proven himself remarkably consistent in the following releases. This is the starting point for his new critical revival, but thank God and thank love this isn't the ending point.
Bob Dylan in a recent interview has said there's really only one person in music today that to him is absolutely stunning. That person, naturally, is Paul McCartney. ""I'm in awe of McCartney. He's about the only one that I am in awe of. He can do it all. And he's never let up... He's just so damn effortless." (Taken from a Rolling Stone interview from summer 2007).
High praise from someone so iconic as Bob Dylan. The last ten years for both McCartney and Dylan have proven them to be the most interesting artists of their generation currently recording. Over the last decade, both Dylan and McCartney have had a massive resurgence in their careers. While each are following their own idiosyncractic paths, both have proven themselves to have remarkable fertile songwriting during this stage in their careers.
And here's the trick. Both are the best at what they do. Sure, you can't imagine Paul McCartney being able to pull of the effortless aural history lessons in songs Dylan has been doing, each steeped in the American tradition and that "Old, Weird, America" of the Anthology of American Folk Music. Come on, could Paul really write "Nettie Moore", "Ain't Talkin'", "Mississippi", "Things Have Changed," "Tell Ol' Bill", or the masterpiece "Cross the Green Mountain"? But then again, you can't see Dylan writing the effortless melodic pop masterpieces McCartney written in FLAMING PIE, DRIVING RAIN, CHAOS & CREATION IN THE BACKYARD (one of my favorite albums of the 2000s), or MEMORY ALMOST FULL.
When FLAMING PIE hit the stores in 1997, four years separate it from McCartney's previous studio offering, OFF THE GROUND. A lot happened during those four years, namely, The Beatles multi-media project THE ANTHOLOGY. The ANTHOLOGY was a massive undertaking, resulting in three double albums of outtakes, a massive coffee-table book that really is one of the definitive resources for us Beatles nuts, and then the hours long documentary as well. Anything like that may get you thinking McCartney would really be in a reflective mood about mortality and unusually somber. Well, not really (the somber, reflective McCartney would come out in his 2005 masterpiece CHAOS).
Instead, according to the liner notes, the Anthology project would be a refresher course on how to construct a well-made song. And FLAMING PIE is full of such songs. According to Wikipedia, "McCartney sporadically recorded the entire album in a space of two years, working not only with Lynne, but with Steve Miller, George Martin, Ringo Starr and his own son, James McCartney, who plays lead guitar on "Heaven on a Sunday". "Calico Skies" and "Great Day" both hailed from a 1992 session, recorded even before Off the Ground had come out." McCartney recorded the album in the space of two years.
The album is really a return to the basic sensibilities that produced records like MCCARTNEY. The music, while carefully considered, doesn't get bogged down in rather pretentious production styles. It's carefully produced, but the music has much more of a live feel to it. While there are a couple of sore spots (the collobaration with Steve Miller always strikes me as generic 1970s rock), this is an album I find myself returning to again and again. It's that good. "Flaming Pie", the song, is just a basic rock and roll song, and while it's drawn from the Lennon story about the man on the flaming pie telling him in a dream they shall be The Beatles with an A, the song's one of the poorer ones on the record. But the rest is great, whether it's the Beatles send up "Song We Were Singing" (one of Paul's best, and just makes you smile), his refletive ballads, or just gorgeous orchestration. McCartney has always been amazing with melodies, and this record has it in spades.
Buy it. The last ten years have made both Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney extraordinarily more relevant than you could hope for if you followed their careers in the 1980s (especially Dylan). And don't worry. McCartney only gets better from this starting point in his discography. Make sure you pick up his other studio albums post dating this - there just as good, and in some cases (CHAOS), better.
McCartney has proven himself to be truly remarkable, and he has released some of his strongest music of his solo career in 1997-2007. He has proven himself remarkably consistent in the following releases. This is the starting point for his new critical revival, but thank God and thank love this isn't the ending point.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Nice Discovery
Never knew this album existed until I heard one of the songs on a commercial. A great song....a great find. A great album.
Published 1 month ago by G. Neal
5.0 out of 5 stars
Geat CD by Macca
If you are a Sir Paul Lover such as myself, you will Love this CD! I never have any problems with Amazon, they delever in timely Fashion, and if you purchase New, rest assured that... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Robin Basile
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stronger than "Tug of War"
My acquisition of "Flaming Pie" yielded a re-calibration of my favorite McCartney Albums. Prior to "Flaming Pie" my favorite McCartney effort was "Tug of War". Read more
Published 3 months ago by K. Brady
5.0 out of 5 stars
just lovely music
Great collection of wonderful songs that really represent the best of Paul and his music. Has been a favorite of mine since the original release.
Published 3 months ago by Sally (as in Herring) Anderson Goodson
5.0 out of 5 stars
Paul's best solo album
Aside from "All Things Must Pass," this is the finest post-Beatles album. It sounds like "Paul Wilbury" thanks to Geoff Lynn's great production. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Tom Sandman
5.0 out of 5 stars
Paul McCartney Flaming Pie CD
Super fast delivery and excellent product (I misplaced my original copy and had to get another). The CD was everything I expected and more! Read more
Published 18 months ago by Carolee A. Beyer
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Jam session, but not his masterpiece
Paul has had a brilliant music career with lots of wings, Beatles, solo, and live albums. This album is a pretty good album to listen to ,but seems to lack some energy. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Cole Schaffner
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great CD
I left this review before but here it is again. This CD is more from the Great Sir Paul. Arrived on time.
Published on May 17, 2011 by Midwest Mark
5.0 out of 5 stars
Even better than Driving Rain
Yes, it's a great comeback album for Sir Paul, but what was the motivating factor behind it--that's what I want to know. Was it his recently working on the Anthology project? Read more
Published on April 8, 2011 by M. Ash
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best of McCartney
This CD is one I just got to, not buying it when it was released. After several plays, I'm hooked. This cd, in my opinion, rates up there with McCartney and Ram. Read more
Published on August 25, 2010 by RickC
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