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Song Exploder

Paul McCartney - Ripples in a Pond

10 Jun 2026

Transcription

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Chapter 1: What is the main topic of Paul McCartney's new album?

0.031 - 16.406 Rishikesh Hirway

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. I'm going to be on tour for the next few weeks, and all the dates are at songexploder.net slash live.

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16.906 - 28.599 Rishikesh Hirway

I'm going to be playing songs from my new album, In the Last Hour of Light, with a full band, and I'm going to be talking about the making of my album with a special guest moderator in each city. I get to be the interviewee instead of the interviewer.

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29.04 - 53.849 Rishikesh Hirway

So I'm going to be joined by Jason Manzoukas, Samin Nasrat, Alison Russell, Joshua Molina, Ken Jennings and John Roderick, Min Jin Lee, and Adam Scott. It's a really personal album, and I hope you can make it out to one of the shows. You can get tickets and more info at songexploder.net slash live. Hi, Rishi. Hi. So nice to meet you. And is it pronounced Rishi? Rishi, yes.

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54.07 - 54.39 Paul McCartney

Rishi.

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54.711 - 54.911 Rishikesh Hirway

Yes.

55.291 - 58.976 Paul McCartney

The H is just there to fool people. Exactly.

60.638 - 61.88 Rishikesh Hirway

Could you introduce yourself?

62.721 - 66.285 Paul McCartney

Hi, this is Paul McCartney, and I'm on Song Exploder.

67.953 - 88.631 Rishikesh Hirway

Paul McCartney is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer whose career spans more than six decades. As a member of The Beatles, and later Wings, and then his own solo albums, he's simply one of the most influential artists of all time. He has more accolades than I have time to list in this intro, but if you're listening to this, you already know all that.

Chapter 2: Where did the idea for 'Ripples in a Pond' come from?

740.118 - 750.49 Paul McCartney

But I think we just decided to leave that off the record and just replace it with guitar.

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764.365 - 768.91 Rishikesh Hirway

How did you first meet Andrew Watt, your co-producer on the album, before you started working together?

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769.16 - 797.015 Paul McCartney

Well, I met him in L.A. My manager said to me, there's this guy called Andrew Watt. I said, yeah, I've heard of him. I liked some of the music he'd done, but I didn't know him. He said, would you like to meet him? I said, yeah, sure. I said, I'll just go and have a cup of tea or something. But I didn't particularly think we'll work together. I thought, let's just see if we like each other.

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797.936 - 829.51 Paul McCartney

So I went over to his studio, which was in the basement of Charlie Chaplin's old house. And we're sitting around chatting. I started to show a couple of ideas and just in general conversation. He followed on, and so we just were sitting there throwing ideas around, and we were writing the first song on the album. That was it. We just met, cup of tea, and a song appeared.

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830.131 - 831.533 Paul McCartney

It was kind of lucky, really.

832.61 - 847.108 Rishikesh Hirway

I can't imagine just the sheer number of people who want to collaborate with you in some kind of way and have wanted to collaborate with you over the years. Is it complicated for you at all to let someone else in to your music?

847.797 - 875.88 Paul McCartney

Yeah, I think so, because, you know, working with John Lennon was something that happened when we were kids. Neither of us really knew how to write songs, so it just grew organically. And because John and I had such a natural relationship that had matured together, I'm inevitably comparing whoever the next person is I'm writing with.

877.261 - 901.935 Paul McCartney

And as time went on and the Beatles broke up and I was no longer writing with John, I did try working with a couple of other people. But yeah, you're right that having worked with John and now for someone to just come into the room, we don't necessarily know much about each other. That does make it a bit harder, I must admit.

902.253 - 913.275 Rishikesh Hirway

So was it hard to then go from that casual conversation with Andrew and working on music with him to formally ask him to work on the production of the album?

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