Off The Ground | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘Off The Ground’ is the title track and opening song from Paul McCartney’s ninth solo studio album.

Right at the end of doing the album Wix said to me ‘We’ve worked very naturally on this album but there’s one thing we haven’t tried and that is a computer thing’. And I said ‘Well, I don’t really want to waste a lot of time on it’ and he said ‘You might want to spend a day on it, though, for a change, just to do something a bit different now that we’ve already got most of the album’, so I thought yeah, it might be fun, actually. So we gave the rest of the band a day off, and just me, Wix and the production team went into the control room for the day – that’s where you mainly do computer stuff.

One of the songs that had been on my list but hadn’t got onto the album was ‘Off The Ground ‘, which at that time was a little folk song. I liked it but it didn’t really fit onto the album so I thought that if we were just going to play around and experiment, maybe even waste a song, we might as well do it with that one. So I brought it in and we started to kick it around. We soon started to get a rhythm track in the computer that changed the song’s direction a bit and made it more exciting. Then I said ‘OK, let me go in and put a little heavy guitar on it’. So we really started enjoying it: we put a bit of machine bass on, which started to make it more funky, then percussion, then I sang on it and it really started to come together as a track. By the end of the day we’d pretty much finished it, with just a few little harmonies and a solo from Robbie still to come.