Paul McCartney was interviewed by pop star Taylor Swift in Rolling Stone for the magazine's ongoing “Musicians On Musicians” feature. The former-Beatle spoke about how his upcoming McCartney III album, which was recorded while isolating with his family, came together without any specific plan, explaining, “I had a lot of stuff that I had been working on, but I’d said, 'I’m just going home now,' and it’d be left half-finished. So I just started saying, 'Well, what about that? I never finished that.' So we’d pull it out, and we said, 'Oh, well, this could be good.' And because it didn’t have to amount to anything, I would say, “Ah, I really want to do tape loops. I don’t care if they fit on this song, I just want to do some.' So I go and make some tape loops, and put them in the song, just really trying to do stuff that I fancy.”
As he had with 1970's McCartney and its 1980 thematic followup, McCartney II, he admitted: “I had no idea it would end up as an album; I may have been a bit less indulgent, but if a track was eight minutes long, to tell you the truth, what I thought was, 'I’ll be taking it home tonight, (my daughter) Mary will be cooking, the grandkids will all be there running around, and someone, maybe Simon, Mary’s husband, is going to say, 'What did you do today?' And I’m going to go, 'Oh,' and then get my phone and play it for them. So this became the ritual.”
Regarding some of the material on the set stretching well past the five-minute mark, “Macca” said, “I hate it when I’m playing someone something and it finishes after three minutes. I kind of like that it just (continues) on. It just keeps going on. I would just come home, 'Well, what did you do today?' 'Oh, well, I did this. I’m halfway through this,' or, 'We finished this.'”
