Fine Line | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘Fine Line’ was the lead single released from Paul McCartney’s 13th solo album Chaos And Creation In The Backyard. See more…

It was just the opening line, ‘There’s a fine line between recklessness and courage.’ You know, you’ll see some people just go, (sings) ‘Waaah’ and you’ll think, ‘that’s the way you do it and sometimes it is just foolish and just reckless but they think they’re being courageous’ so that thought really was what started me off and I just kind of followed on from that idea that you’ve got to choose which of the two you’re going to do, you know, be reckless or courageous so that was lyrically based on that. And then I just sat down at the piano and started that kind of chuggy thing, keeping it very simple and then the little hook, (sings) ‘Fine line, it’s a fine line’ came so I brought it into the studio in Los Angeles and I was working it out and on that little bit there’s a little riff that goes around the Fine line bit and when I was playing that I made a mistake and I went to a wrong bass note and Nigel [Godrich] goes, ‘That’s great. That’s it.’ I went, ‘Actually it’s a wrong note.’ He said, ‘No, no, check it out. Listen to it.’ ‘Ooh, I see what you mean.’ It just didn’t go where you expected it. It was supposed to be like an F# and it went to an F and so that became a really interesting little thing then. It was like, ‘Ah, OK, that’s good’. That’s got a little signature originality to it so that and the words and the tune then we just put that all together.