THE first video from Paul McCartney’s new album, “Memory Almost Full,” is an otherworldly fantasy, directed by the French filmmaker Michel Gondry, in which a postman brings this former Beatle a box with an old mandolin and, it turns out, an assembly of mischievous ghosts. As Mr. McCartney plays “Dance Tonight,” with its simple percussion and bright pop melody, the ghosts — including one played by Natalie Portman — leap around him, throw sparkling fireballs and scare off the postman. Mr. McCartney later follows them into the box, and as the clip ends, he is seen jamming with them, playing the drums.
Paul McCartney’s “Memory Almost Full” is to be released on Tuesday on Hear Music. Mr. McCartney, who played all the instruments on about half the songs, calls it a “rather personal” album.
Surreal as the video is, it says a lot about what Mr. McCartney is up to on “Memory Almost Full,” to be released on Tuesday on the Hear Music label, a joint venture between Starbucks and the Concord Music Group. The ghosts may terrify the postman, but Mr. McCartney happily cavorts with them. And while the ghosts don’t seem to be from Mr. McCartney’s past, his comfort with them suggests the ease with which his history informs many of the songs on the album, including a suite that moves from childhood memories to thoughts of death. He is describing “Memory Almost Full” as a “rather personal” album.
It almost wasn’t an album at all. Mr. McCartney began recording it at the end of 2003 with his touring band but abruptly shelved the project. It wasn’t that he was dissatisfied with the music, he said in a telephone interview from his recording studio in Sussex, England; but he had wanted to work with Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s longtime producer. When Mr. Godrich became available, Mr. McCartney decided to start fresh and to play all the instruments himself. That collaboration yielded “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard” in 2005.
The tapes for “Memory Almost Full” languished as he moved on to other things, including his divorce from Heather Mills and the latest in his growing series of classical scores, “Ecce Cor Meum,” a large work for chorus and orchestra dedicated to the memory of his first wife, Linda, who died in 1998.
Then he remembered the recordings he had filed away.
“I realized that I didn’t want to have any unfinished work lying around,” he said.
His first move was to summon David Kahne, who produced his “Driving Rain” CD (2001) and the early recordings for the shelved album. It wasn’t Mr. McCartney’s plan to record the rest of the album without his band, but with a studio at his house it was hard to resist wandering out to finish tracks he was working on whenever the mood took him, and in the end he played all the instruments on about half the tracks.
“Memory Almost Full” is a change for Mr. McCartney, although not primarily in musical ways. It has, after all, hints of everything from the sound of his 1970s band, Wings, to echoes of relatively recent work like “Flaming Pie,” from 1997, and Mr. McCartney seems to heave steadfastly avoided hopping on current pop music trends.
Still, he wanted to shake up his approach to releasing an album. The video made its debut on YouTube. And having been an EMI artist since the Beatles signed with the company in 1962 (apart from a series of American releases on Columbia in the 1980s), he moved to Hear Music, hoping to draw on the eagerness and energy of an upstart label.
“Am I feeling like I’ve left the family home?” Mr. McCartney said, when asked if switching labels was traumatic. “I have left the family home, but it doesn’t feel bad. I hate to tell you — the people at EMI sort of understood. The major record labels are having major problems. They’re a little puzzled as to what’s happening. And I sympathize with them. But as David Kahne said to me about a year ago, the major labels these days are like the dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid.”
Although Hear Music has collaborated with other labels on projects ranging from Ray Charles’s “Genius Loves Company” to a recent compilation of John Lennon tracks, Mr. McCartney is the first artist signed to it directly. To celebrate his album’s release Starbucks is having what it is calling a global listening event: The album will be played around the clock on Tuesday in more than 10,000 Starbucks stores in 29 countries. Based on its high-volume traffic — some 44 million customers a week — the company expects about six million people to hear the music that day. Starbucks’ channel on XM satellite radio will also be promoting the record heavily, and XM will devote another channel exclusively to Mr. McCartney’s music on the release day.
“We got a call saying that Paul McCartney was interested in talking to us,” said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment, “and after we picked ourselves up off the floor, we met with him in London and had a pretty in-depth conversation about who we are as a company, and about our commitment to music.” He added that the company told Mr. McCartney it could “bring more exposure to this album than to other projects he’s done.”
Hear Music is releasing “Memory Almost Full” simultaneously on CD and as digital downloads, through iTunes. Mr. McCartney has already made several songs available online, both through iTunes (his Live8 performances, for example) and on his own Web site, paulmccartney.com. But this is his first full album available digitally, and iTunes is offering a version with bonus tracks, and, for preorders, the “Dance Tonight” video.
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