Paul McCartney - Kisses on the Bottom (Deluxe Edition) (2012)

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Paul McCartney - Kisses on the Bottom (Deluxe Edition) (2012)

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Kisses on the Bottom is the sixteenth solo studio album by Paul McCartney. The album's title, "Kisses on the Bottom", comes from the album's lead track "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter", originally a hit for Fats Waller in 1935. Said McCartney on the album, "I worked with Diana Krall, and great jazz musicians like John Clayton. This is an album very tender, very intimate. This is an album you listen to at home after work, with a glass of wine or a cup of tea."

The Deluxe Edition of the album includes two additional tracks, a download code for access to an exclusive live show available from Paul McCartney's website a week after the album's release, and longer liner notes and expanded album packaging, including three postcards.

Review:In April 2010, a cloud of black volcanic ash gathered over Europe, blocking all air travel between the U.S. and Britain. One prisoner of the atmosphere was Paul McCartney, who was forced to spend several extra nights in Manhattan. The ex-Beatle was staying at the Carlyle Hotel and, having unanticipated time on his hands, found himself in Bemelmans Bar, the Carlyle's jazz lounge. There he came across the Thailand-born pianist-singer Loston Harris and his trio, with guitarist Ron Affif and bassist Chris Berger. According to Mr. Affif, Mr. McCartney not only spent several nights enjoying the trio's music, but sat in with the group on "The Very Thought of You." Upon hearing himself singing this classic (and, coincidentally, British) song, he became determined to go ahead with an idea that had been on his mind for some years: to do a whole album of the Great American Songbook.

Now, almost two years later, Mr. McCartney has released his newest studio album, "Kisses on the Bottom"—his first to consist almost entirely of interpretations of existing songs. The ironies of Mr. McCartney recording an album of traditional, prerock numbers are numerous: If there was any one band that put the older generation of songwriters out of business, it was the Beatles. It was their unprecedented success as both performers and composers that made it a given for pop stars to write their own material. From the mid-1960s on, old-school singers who didn't write and full-time composers who didn't perform were forced, in the words of singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, "to go kicking and screaming into that good night."

Mr. McCartney has said that what held him back from doing a standards project up to now was that so many rock stars (most successfully, Rod Stewart) have done such albums in recent years. Even Bob Dylan, the last person in the world you'd think would travel that road, did an album of traditional pop Christmas songs in 2009. What distinguishes Mr. McCartney's effort from those of his fellow '60s and '70s rockers is that most of the others seem to have started with Frank Sinatra as a point of departure. Mr. McCartney, conversely, has placed his effort solidly in the pantheon of great singing musicians, starting with Fats Waller (one of his signature songs, "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Right Myself a Letter," yielded the album's title, "Kisses on the Bottom") and Charles Brown (whose early R&B crooning style Mr. McCartney honors on "Get Yourself Another Fool").

But by far the overwhelming influence on "Kisses" is Nat King Cole. Mr. McCartney taped the album at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, and has said repeatedly that he felt intimidated at the idea of working where Cole once played and sang. There are more songs from the Cole songbook than any other (and none associated with Sinatra), and all the principal players on the album, including pianist-arranger Diana Krall and guitar soloist John Pizzarelli (as well as Mr. Harris) are overt Cole disciples. The album divides into three general formats: The King Cole Trio (on "It's Only a Paper Moon," violinist Andy Stein pays tribute to Stuff Smith's contribution on Cole's classic "After Midnight" album); Nat King Cole with strings (Johnny Mandel and Alan Broadbent, who wrote the sumptuously beautiful large-format orchestrations, have both worked with Natalie Cole on her tributes to her father); and a hybrid of the two, where you feel the jazzy presence of piano (Ms. Krall) and guitar (Mr. Pizzarelli) on top of a string backdrop, which is also a format that Cole used extensively in the middle of his short career.

Mr. McCartney has also said that on most of the sessions he felt like he was "on holiday," in that singing the old standards is not what he does for a living. The idea of being on vacation, as we Yanks would say, seems to have liberated him from having to take anything too seriously, which for an album evoking Waller and Cole (especially in the latter's earlier years) is a very good thing. Mr. McCartney sings many of the faster numbers, like the Waller classic "My Very Good Friend the Milkman," in an entirely different voice, presumably evoking African-American jazz singers of the '40s. It's a voice that I would have never recognized as Mr. McCartney's; you could say that this is his "Holiday" voice, as in Billie Holiday.

What's especially telling is that his two new songs, "My Valentine" and "Only Our Hearts," are among his finest. Although the latter has an old-fashioned verse that references the standard "Body and Soul," on the whole they don't (unlike "When I'm 64" and "Honey Pie") specifically evoke the world of prerock standards. He doesn't use the Holiday voice here, sounding instead like Paul McCartney of Beatles and Wings fame. These two originals boast stunning string charts by Messrs. Broadbent and Mandel and some of the composer's most impassioned singing.

From bottom to top, "Kisses on the Bottom" is a much more classy and heartfelt effort than all the other rockers-go-standards projects (a genre partially launched, coincidentally, by fellow Beatle Ringo Starr's 1970 "Sentimental Journey"); it will probably be the only one that, in future years, I'll listen to anywhere near as often as the classic recordings of Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra.