Rinse The Raindrops

‘Rinse The Raindrops’ is the penultimate song on Paul McCartney’s 2001 album Driving Rain.

I’ve only ever written a couple of songs where the lyrics came first. ‘All My Loving’ with The Beatles was the first one of those. We were on a tour bus and I didn’t have a guitar or, obviously, a piano with me. So I wrote the words on the bus and finished the song when I found a piano at the gig. This was a similar thing – I was sailing and some words came to me that I wasn’t sure whether they were a poem or a song. I liked them and sort of wrote a rough melody for them in my head. But then we were in the studio one day and I fancied doing something different with the guys. We’d come to the end of my more prepared tunes, so I thought I’d do something crazy with this. I took the two verses, it’s only got two verses, and very hastily wrote a bridge and an instrumental bridge for it. I showed them the bits on an acoustic and then got onto bass and we just jammed the song for half an hour or so.

Lasting 10:08, ‘Rinse The Raindrops’ is by some distance the longest track on Driving Rain, and one of the longest in McCartney’s entire discography.

David [Kahne, producer] reckoned I sang the verse about 48 times. Because I was doing just the same lyric, I just sang it every way I could think of so that hopefully he could get something out of that. We went home and left him to stay up until four in the morning to work on it. We came in the next day and David said ‘I couldn’t get it down any shorter than this’, he’d collaged together all the bits he liked, and it’s like a ten-minute song. It reminds me of festivals in summer, hippies and bands jamming. There’s a good energy to it.

‘Rinse The Raindrops’ was recorded at Henson Studios in Los Angeles in February 2001, during a three-week block of sessions for Driving Rain.

Recorded 19th February 2001 onto 16-track analogue tape then loaded into Logic Audio for overdubs. Paul played Höfner bass and sang a lead vocal then overdubbed Spanish guitar and further vocals. Abe played Paul’s Ludwig drum kit then overdubbed an accordion. Rusty played Gibson 335 electric guitar then overdubbed ‘strat’ electric guitar. Gabe played Wurlitzer electric piano then overdubbed piano and Hammond organ.

McCartney’s voice had been affected by a holiday to Goa, India, in January 2001, where he wrote the songs ‘Lonely Road’, ‘I Do’, ‘About You’, and the lyrics of ‘Riding Into Jaipur’.

when I was in India some carpet salesman ripped me off with a purchase that I made. He told me that this carpet was like the rarest thing ever; but then I got to the next town and found about twenty of them. So I rang him up and I was telling him that he was a rip-off. And as I was doing it, that and probably the weather, I started to lose my voice. The following day my voice really went, I couldn’t talk. It took a while to clear and I was thinking ‘shit, it’s only a week to the recording sessions’. I was in my car, practising singing and I couldn’t get the high notes. I thought oh my God, never mind, don’t panic. So I came to LA with my voice in quite a rough shape and decided to do the easy songs first, just to get the tracks down. But then I ended up just letting loose on one song, this monster ten-minute song called ‘Rinse The Raindrops.’ where I really ripped it, and it all came good. It’s a nice quality, if you can get it, a rawness. The opposite of it is a trained thing and the one thing that my voice has never been is trained. It’s been trained by Beatle tours, trained on the road. But I never had any vocal training, I never got into any vocal warm-ups that people do. I just cross my fingers and just go for it – and I’ve been very lucky that through the years it doesn’t seem to have altered much. Again, I don’t know why that is; and again I’d rather not know and just be glad if it comes good on a take. I just wing it every time, like I always have done. If it’s a shouty song, I just jump it out of the top of my head and just hope that it makes the right noise.

McCartney never performed ‘Rinse The Raindrops’ live in concert.

The song was remixed for Twin Freaks, McCartney’s 2005 album with producer Roy Kerr (aka The Freelance Hellraiser).

A promotional 12″ vinyl single containing the album’s remixes of ‘Rinse The Raindrops’ and ‘What’s That You’re Doing?’ was released that year, reportedly with only 200 copies being pressed worldwide.