Paul McCartney’s ‘Momma Gets By’ Is a Full-Circle Masterpiece

“Momma gets by while Papa gets high,” Paul McCartney sings at the end of his superb new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane. It’s a story he’s kept telling his whole career — the ballad of a tough, lonely, but resilient old woman, who nobody else even notices. He’s always written songs about these women, going back to “Eleanor Rigby” and “Lady Madonna” to “Another Day” or “Jenny Wren.” This is Paul’s favorite kind of person to sing about — or maybe just his favorite kind of person.

It’s always been something that set McCartney apart from other male songwriters of his generation. Sixty years ago, he wrote “Eleanor Rigby,” just a boy of 24, a Beatle with the whole world at his feet. But he’s still chronicling her all these years later, now that he’s older than Eleanor Rigby ever got to be. “Momma Gets By” sounds like a full-circle moment for him — the culmination of a lifelong story.

The woman in “Momma Gets By” holds down a job to pay the rent, keeps the family together. Her lazy husband ignores her, but she doesn’t grumble, just makes do. Why? “She loves him,” Paul sings, over and over. “With all her heart and soul.” He reaches up into his most fragile high notes, so that you can hear his real voice, the one he’s got now, weathered by the years. He wants to make sure nobody misses hearing all the long and winding roads in his voice.

Paul was always fascinated by old folks, even when he was the world’s favorite symbol of flaming youth. In the Summer of Love, he gave the world a soft-shoe fantasy about a couple at the unthinkable age of sixty-four. But “When I’m 64” was younger, so much younger than today. In a few weeks, he’s turning 84. And damn right, we still need him and feed him.

Dungeon Lane continues his historic hot streak — the fact that Sir Paul can just pick up a guitar at 83, and songs like these come spilling out? The man wrote “Love Me Do” sixty-nine years ago. That’s the Fifties, in case your math is shaky. But here he is in the Twenties, still on top of his game. Dungeon Lane has maybe two or three subpar songs, out of fourteen — if Drake could make an album with this kind of hit-to-miss ratio, he’d really have more slaps than the Beatles.

Macca’s past two decades have been a golden age, ever since his 2005 resurgence Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. “First Star of the Night” is a love ballad that makes eighty-something romance sound like heaven on earth. It fits with “The Kiss of Venus” from 2020, or “Venus and Mars” from 1974 — Macca can’t miss when he’s in in stargazing mode. “Mountain Top” and “Lost Horizon” are seductive psychedelic trips that he turns into love songs, because, well, he’s Paul.

He also sings about looking back on the Beatles, as all four of these lads loved to do any time they visited the studio. Between the solo careers of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, they’ve got more “remember when we were the Beatles?” songs than actual Beatles songs. “Home To Us” and “We Two” revisit Liverpool with Ringo; “Days We Left Behind” and the great “Down South” celebrate early days with his mates. (Fact: No other bands do this! Mick Jagger would rather let Keith shave his testicles blindfolded than sing about how much fun they had with Brian Jones.)

“Momma Gets By” is an alternate timeline where Eleanor Rigby finally got the wedding she wanted, though it’s not like her dreams, but she’s holding on. McCartney refuses to let you hear any irony in here, because there isn’t any. He won’t condescend to her, won’t pity her, and won’t allow you to, either. He refuses to turn this into a sad song. (He could have done that easily if he wanted — he’s not bad at it.) But he sees her day-to-day struggle as a noble stand against the world, keeping her “heart and soul” alive.

Sixty years on, “Eleanor Rigby” is a song that everybody knows, but it keeps getting more mysterious with time. Let’s say it again: Paul was 24 when he wrote it. Sorry, that’s just absurd. He was a Beatle, the prettiest boy alive, the world’s most glam pop star. Swinging London was his playground, full of parties and exhibits and nightclubs. But he couldn’t stop thinking about weary, lonely Eleanor, lurking in the back of a church, picking up rice. (What an image for a 24-year-old boy.) Not even the priest notices her. But he gave this outcast one of his most beautiful melodies, inspiring George Martin’s innovative string arrangement.

In his Lyrics book, there’s a snapshot he took in 1966, looking out the window of the room where he lived, upstairs in the attic of his girlfriend Jane Asher’s parents’ house. You see that view, and you picture Paul looking out at a city of excitement. But he gazed out that window, and saw all the lonely people. He wrote “Eleanor Rigby” in that room. 

But he’s always been fascinated by this heroine’s story. He’s followed her through the decades, from “Treat Her Gently/Lonely Old People” to “Junk” to “Little Willow.” His first solo single was “Another Day,” in 1971: a day in the life of an ordinary office clerk, with work to do, but struggling to keep her hopes and dreams alive. Nobody else would have noticed her, much less written her a song. “I suppose, basically, it’s because I’m a voyeur,” Paul told me in 2021. “Observing a woman rather than just being with her, thinking, ‘Oh, I love that.’ Drinking a cup of coffee, going to the office with her papers, all that — following her through her day.”

“Momma Gets By” celebrates the values he revered in the elder generation. But he didn’t just pay lip service to those values. In the 1970s, when every other English rock star, including his fellow Fabs, was getting lost in the fleshpots of Hollywood, chasing sex and drugs and Brandy Alexanders, Paul was up on the farm with Linda, way out in Scotland, raising an armful of kids. He was digging drains and feeding chickens and making sure the roof didn’t leak. He was literally fixing the holes where the rain got in. It stopped his mind from wandering.

He was the Beatle who had no use for the generational warfare of their time, even putting his dad’s hero Fred Astaire on the cover of Sgt. Pepper in 1967. In “When I’m 64,” Paul and John play the aging couple, wonderfully playing their voices off each other to boast, “We shall scrimp and save!” These two, honestly — already planning to be a crotchety elderly married couple, when they were still two cocky young lads on top of the world. They deserved so much more time to get old together.

Anyone who hears “nostalgia” on Dungeon Lane is doing better than me — he’s singing about bombs falling in World War II, food rations, hard labor, sickness, poverty, the bad old days. He was from an immigrant family, of course — his mother’s father was from Ireland, and the Beatles came straight from Liverpool’s Irish-immigrant culture. “Salesman Saint” and “Life Can Get Hard” are warmly vivid tales of his parents and their generation, struggling in bleak times. He’s never let the world forget about his Mother Mary, a nurse and midwife in the toughest part of Liverpool. She died from cancer when he was a child, but he made sure the whole world knew her name, and thanks to “Let It Be,” the world does.

That has to be part of his fascination with senior women — the kind Mary McCartney never got a chance to be. It’s also why he’s always been obsessed with old-time romantic ballads, the kind his dad Jim loved to play on piano — the slow dances that his folks never got to share in old age. (Have you listened to “Baby’s Request” lately? From Back to the Egg, the final Wings album? Do yourself a big favor this weekend.)

But the heroine of “Momma Gets By” has always been at the heart of Paul McCartney’s music, across his whole life. She could be the muse of “Another Day” or “Blackbird,” or she could be “Jenny Wren,” the star of the greatest song he’s written in this century. Despite her broken heart, at the end, he vows, “The day will come when Jenny Wren will sing!” This song ends the same way — nobody notices her quiet everyday heroism, but nothing can quench her spirit. 

Some of you aren’t ready for this conversation, but McCartney’s past two decades have been the most glorious creative roll of his post-Beatles life. Like, he’s making his best post-Abbey Road music right now. Chaos and Creation did for him in 2005 what Time Out of Mind did for Bob Dylan in 1997 — he found his authentic old-man voice, and hasn’t made an unworthy album since. (Let me assure you, nobody in the Eighties would have predicted a future like this — Dylan and McCartney both making stellar records every few years? We would have killed for just one of these.)

The world is still scrambling to catch up with all the lost treasures that Sir Paul scattered way back in the 1970s — see his recent Wings memoir, or Morgan Neville’s delightful doc Man on the Run. But why wait? The fact that Paul McCartney is still giving us songs as powerful as “Momma Gets By,” nearly seventy years after he took up his guitar and started, is a reason to celebrate.