McCartney bought a mandolin from a guitar shop he frequents in London. Over the holiday, he played around with it in his kitchen, trying to find chords and singing, "Everybody gonna dance tonight." Whenever he started to play, his 3 year old daughter Beatrice would come running in and started to dance around, after which McCartney says the song "wrote itself."
This song was a last minute addition to the album, which McCartney released on Starbucks' Hear Music label.
Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, The Science Of Sleep) directed the video, which depicts a band of ghosts including Natalie Portman and MacKenzie Crook cavorting with a mandolin-playing McCartney. Portman was persuaded to take part by McCartney's designer daughter, Stella. He explained to USA Today: "Natalie is vegetarian, and Stella does the world's most stylish non-leather shoes. That was the connection. I rang her up. I think the combination of Michel Gondry and myself interested her."
It emerged that "Memory Almost Full" is an anagram of "for my soul mate LLM" (the initials of his late wife Linda Louise McCartney). The Guardian newspaper asked McCartney if it was intentional. He replied, "Some things are best left a mystery." McCartney told USA Today that the album title, taken from a message that popped up when his mobile phone's memory bank neared capacity, was also a lucky accident. He said, "It struck me as quite poetic. In modern life, there is so much sensory overload. There's so much coming at you these days that you have to delete something to make room for something else. And it applies equally to a 20-year-old as it does to me."
This won McCartney the Best Male Pop Vocal Performance at the 2008l Grammy Awards.
Memory Almost Full won for Best Pop Vocal Album.
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Suggestion credit:
Bertrand - Paris, France
Paul McCartney composed this on a mandolin that he'd just bought. He told the Mail on Sunday May 12, 2008 how he composed the song: "This was the last track I recorded for the album. I was on my way to a meeting, but before I got there I went for a walk, to experience life for a minute. There's a guitar shop I like to visit and so I went there and got chatting to the guy who works there. He said he had a left-handed mandolin to show me, and I ended up buying it. The great thing was that I didn't know how to play it - it's tuned like a violin, so I had no idea what the chords were. It took me back to when I was a teenager being presented with an instrument. I had to figure out how to play it. I found one chord, then another, and then a really strange chord. I still don't know what it is but it sounded great.
At home, I started stomping around the kitchen, playing this little instrument, just enjoying myself. I sang, 'Everybody gonna dance tonight' and my little girl came running in and started dancing, so I fell in love with the song. In fact, I liked it so much I ran into the studio to record it, and stuck it on the album. It seemed like a good atmospheric opening."
