Appreciate

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

There is a little one called ‘Appreciate’ which is soft of a weird little track I mean, that was a great one to make, because we kind of layered it and built it up and at the end of it I got to play this slide guitar solo. The amp of the guitar was so hot that it kind of played itself, so I have particular memories of that.

While recording the song McCartney experimented with autotune on his vocals.

I had a mess around on an auto-tuner. I knew all my mates would go… People I knew were going: ‘Oh, no. You can’t do that.’ Because of that, I’d never even gotten near one. But I went to see Kanye and he’s using one live, and I thought: ‘You know what, that’d be fun.’ On this ‘Appreciate’ track I did some stuff, but in the end we didn’t use it.

On 16 May 2014, the day after McCartney landed in Tokyo for the Japanese leg of his Out There tour, a video for ‘Appreciate’ was released.

The video features Newman the robot. Here’s the description which accompanied the video:

Paul McCartney has collaborated with some of the biggest names in the world. In recent years his videos have featured a stellar line up of guests including Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, Jude Law, Tom Ford, Sean Penn and Natalie Portman.

Today, Paul announced his first artistic collaboration with a robot. Newman, the robot, has teamed up with Paul for his new music video for the song ‘Appreciate’. ‘Appreciate’ is taken from Paul’s latest studio album ‘NEW’, which was launched last year.

The video sees Newman on patrol in a museum of humans. Newman is drawn to one exhibition in particular. In a dimly lit sound studio he sees Paul McCartney sitting on a stool holding his iconic Höfner bass guitar. Paul twitches making a sound on the guitar and to Newman’s astonishment he starts to come to life as the song ‘Appreciate’ starts up. Paul comes closer to Newman staring at him through a force field that encloses him. Newman reaches through the force field and pulls Paul out of his exhibition. As the two of them move around the museum all the exhibitions start coming to life too.

Speaking about Newman Paul said: “I woke up one morning with an image in my head of me standing with a large robot. I thought it might be something that could be used for the cover of my album NEW but instead the idea turned out to be for my music video for ‘Appreciate’. Together with the people who had done the puppetry for the worldwide hit War Horse we developed the robot who became Newman.”

The video was premiered exclusively in Japan this week where Paul and his band will be performing to sold-out crowds in Tokyo and Osaka. Newman will also be joining Paul on this leg of his tour.

The video was directed by Andre Chocron and filmed in London. Newman was designed by Mervyn Millar and Ed Dimbleby for Significant Object Ltd.