Paul McCartney is 83 years old and he just announced a new album. The Boys of Dungeon Lane is out May 29 on MPL/Capitol, produced with Andrew Watt, and the first single “Days We Left Behind” is a memory song about Liverpool, about the street where he grew up, about John Lennon and Forthlin Road and a working-class childhood that had very little materially and apparently gave everything.

The instinct, every time McCartney releases something new, is to measure it against the past. That instinct is almost always a mistake, and it is worth saying something about why.

Late-career McCartney is a genuine creative puzzle. On one hand, he has been doing this for sixty-five years and the gravitational pull of his catalogue is so massive that almost anything he makes will live in its shadow. On the other hand, he keeps making things. McCartney III in 2020 was a genuine surprise: a solo-in-the-literal-sense record made at home during lockdown that had more restless energy than most albums by artists a third his age. It was not trying to be Sgt. Pepper. It was trying to be whatever Paul McCartney felt like doing that afternoon, and it was better for it.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane sounds like it is going to be something different again, more explicitly autobiographical, more rooted in memory and place. McCartney has circled back to Liverpool before, most famously in his classical work and in various documentary and archival projects, but rarely with this kind of directness in a pop song context. “It’s just a lot of memories of Liverpool,” he said of the lead single, with a plainness that sounds almost deliberately unguarded.

This is the productive tension in late McCartney: the most famous songwriter alive, making music that sounds like it is being made for reasons that have nothing to do with fame. The commercial pressure is essentially zero at this point. He does not need a hit. He does not need critical redemption. He sells out stadiums regardless. What remains is the question of what you make music for when you no longer need to make music for anything.

The answer, in McCartney’s case, seems to be: for the same reasons you always did. Curiosity. Company. The need to put the thing that is in your head into a form that someone else can hear.

Working with Andrew Watt is an interesting choice. Watt has produced records for Ozzy Osbourne, the Rolling Stones, and Eddie Vedder in recent years, all of them artists navigating similar territory, legacy acts in the third act trying to make something that feels alive rather than archival. The results have been mixed, but the instinct is right. You need a collaborator who is not reverent. Someone who will push back. Whether that is what happened on The Boys of Dungeon Lane remains to be heard, but the pairing suggests McCartney is at least asking the right questions.

The deeper question that a McCartney album always surfaces is about what we want from artists who have already given so much. Do we want them to keep pushing into new territory, with all the risk of failure that involves? Or do we want something that consolidates, that gives us a coherent portrait of a life in music? The best answer is probably that we want both, and the best late-career albums manage to be both at once: the artist as they are now, in full conversation with everything they have been.

“Days We Left Behind” suggests that is at least what McCartney is reaching for. Whether the rest of the album gets there is a question for May. But the fact that he is still reaching is the thing worth noting.