McCartney Bounces Back
When Paul McCartney visited Atlanta earlier this year, he discovered a pharmacy filled with bath salts, incense, candles - and the title song for his new album.
"I was looking in the shop window and I saw this bottle of bath salts called Run Devil Run" McCartney said in a statement accompanying the album. "I thought it was a good title for a song. So when I was on holiday after that, I started thinking of words for it and it came quite easily."
McCartney was in Atlanta in January to see daughter Heather unveil her line of household creations at a trade show. He spotted Miller's Rexall Drugs store while he and son James, 21, walked around downtown. James had said he wanted to visit the "funky" side of downtown, McCartney said.
The album hits stores Tuesday. The store is pictured on the album cover, but the name "Miller's" on the sign has been changed to "Earl's."
Paul McCartney said that he has emerged from a long period of grief following the death of his wife and his days have finally become brighter.
McCartney, 57, told the British news agency Press Association that he did very little in the 12 months immediately following the death of Linda McCartney in April 1998 of breast cancer.
"Just this, that and the other really ... I wasn't really taking my mind off it. No, I was putting my mind in it actually," he said. "So there was a lot of seeing how it affected me, letting it wash over me and just trying to see, honestly, what it was that I was feeling."
McCartney said he believed his wife would not have wanted him to grieve for her beyond six months.
"It did actually take longer than that," he said. "After about a year, a year and a few months, it started to get a bit brighter," he said.
McCartney has made just a handful of brief live appearances since his wife died.
"I'm playing it very casually at the moment. I've got no big plans because I don't really need to have any," he said.
McCartney also thinks it is "cool" Oasis lead singer Liam Gallagher and his actress wife Patsy Kensit have named their son after John Lennon.
McCartney said he thought it was appropriate the bad boy of British pop music should choose to name his son after the late ex-Beatle who Gallagher acknowleges was a major inspiration behind Oasis's music.
"I think it's a cool name. It's a nice tribute. Liam has always obviously been a mega-fan of John's," McCartney told the tabloid newspaper Sun.
"I suppose it's like calling your baby after the Liverpool football team. I think it's a good name - but then I would, wouldn't I?" he added.
Meanwhile, John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to "I am the Walrus" were nevertheless snapped up Thursday for $129,200. Scrawled in ink, full of corrections, incomplete and often illegible, the words to one of the Beatles' most enigmatic songs were bought by an anonymous telephone bidder.