My Top 1000 Songs #307: Back Seat Of My Car

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Yep, diving back into Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram, the first rock & roll album I ever heard as a kid and thus one that's hard for me to listen to objectively. But even setting aside that emotional entanglement, it's hard to deny that "Back Seat Of My Car" is a perfect power pop song--maybe a little more melodic and mid-tempo than most, but wickedly infectious, just a boy and a girl sitting you know where. Perhaps more than anything he did with that earlier band of his, it feels to me like the blueprint for 70s power pop. Roll an extra joint and it's not that far from here to Big Star's "In The Street."

One of my favorite parts of the recent Get Back documentary was the clip of Paul working out this tune on the piano--had no idea it dated back to those sessions--and being stuck with wondering how glorious this could've been as a Beatles song.

Sadly, never a part of Paul's live repertoire, but here's a fantastic live cover: