McCartney

McCartney is the debut solo studio album by Paul McCartney, released in April 1970 on Apple Records, recorded entirely at McCartney's home in St. John's Wood and Scotland using a four-track tape machine, with McCartney performing all instruments himself and his wife Linda McCartney contributing backing vocals on several tracks. McCartney wrote all the original material and released the album alongside a self-conducted press interview, distributed with the record, in which he answered questions about the Beatles' future by declining to confirm they were still together, an oblique announcement that was interpreted as his departure from the group and effectively precipitated the band's public dissolution. The album's home-recording aesthetic, rough, unpolished, deliberately modest, was the aesthetic opposite of the Abbey Road production McCartney had completed the previous year, and it established the unmediated, domestic approach that would reappear on McCartney II in 1980. 'Maybe I'm Amazed,' one of McCartney's finest post-Beatles ballads, was included as an album track rather than a single on the original release; it has since been ranked among the greatest rock songs of the era by multiple critic polls. McCartney reached number one on the Billboard 200 and the UK Albums Chart, its commercial performance driven by the Beatles-break narrative that surrounded its release as much as by its content.