Paul McCartney is in full-on “holy shit, I might keel over any minute now,” legacy mode these days. And while the majority of his constant interviewing, guesting, reissuing, occasionally re-recording, and even “personally overseeing the mastering of” exploits in recent years have mostly been related to the more or less full-time job of making sure no one finds out that The Zombies were a better pop band than The Beatles, this time he’s turning the attention to his first two solo records, 1970’s awesome McCartney and 1980’s good-by-1980-standards McCartney II.
Word is that these crazy-deluxe reissues, which are being jointly tackled by MPL and Concord Music Group, were remastered at Abbey Road while McCartney himself was sleeping on the studio couch. They’re set to hit stores and the web on June 14 in the US and June 13 everywhere else, and, as you might expect, they come in a newswriter-confounding hodgepodge of different formats and editions, including “double-disc Special Editions” and “Deluxe Editions (including DVDs and additional bonus material),” both of which are available on CD sets, vinyl sets, digital files, and as manila folders full of binary code hand-typed onto cardstock. The two different editions come with their own crazy lists of bonus B-sides and live cuts, which I will not even attempt to type out and format for TMT. Check out the man’s website for the complete tracklists and whatnot. You can also preorder there pretty soon.
• Paul McCartney: http://www.paulmccartney.com
• MPL: http://www.mplcommunications.com
• Concord Music Group: http://www.concordmusicgroup.com
