Alligator

‘Alligator’ is the second song on Paul McCartney’s 16th solo studio album New.

I had a few weeks when I settled in a regular system. What I would do is, I’d take my little girl to school, my youngest daughter and then I’d come back, and I’d have some time before I would have to go and pick her up again. So, I’d just come home get myself a cup of green tea and sit with my guitar or piano. On ‘Alligator’ I wanted to feel Zen. I was messing around and I staffed getting the idea: ‘I need someone to come home to. I need a place I can rest.’ I knew that in about three or four hours’ time after I started I’d be ringing Nancy, who was in New York, and I knew I’d wake her up. It was about 12 o’clock, it was 7 o’clock for her. So this gave me a motivation to write something and ring her up and say: ‘Morning, baby. You wanna hear a song?’

That was one where we experimented a lot. Because his music is just so all around us now, we forget that Paul, with The Beatles and solo, was always on the cutting edge of technology. So it makes sense that he would want to try out all these new pieces of equipment. We used a TC Helicon for the vocals, which is what Kanye uses a lot on his stuff, so there’s some really interesting things going on with the vocals in the bridges of that song.