Nothing For Free

‘Nothing For Free’ is one of two bonus tracks on Egypt Station, Paul McCartney’s 17th solo studio album. It was co-written by Ryan Tedder, who also produced the song with McCartney.

So out of all the producers that were suggested, I liked Ryan, rung him up and we chatted. He said, ‘What do you hope to get [out of this]?’ I was like, oh I don’t know. And then I thought, come on Paul, don’t be so shy. So I said, ‘A hit?’ And he was like ‘Yeah! Now you’re talking my language! The world loves a hit!’ So that was our brief. To do something commercial. In a week, we ended up with three songs and one of them was ‘Fuh You’, which is on the album.

The bonus songs were available on CD editions of the album sold at Target stores in the US, and HMV in the UK. The other bonus track is ‘Get Started’.

I did three tracks with Ryan and [‘Fuh You’] is the one on the album and then there’s two others, they’re nice. We only had a week, because there was a time when Greg was doing something else and my manager rung up and said you could maybe get with another producer, just to switch it up a bit, so he sent me some suggestions and I liked Ryan’s stuff. I rang him, and I think we decided he’d come to my studio for a week and we’d just see how we went. I said, ‘I’ve got a lot of songs we could do,’ but in the end, he just fancied making it up, so we just, you know, we went in with nothing, just got a beat, got a thing, got an idea for some lyrics and just built it up, you know, but he knows what he’s doing.