Paul McCartney announcing an album about pre-Beatles Liverpool at 83 is one of those events that sounds like it should be a farewell or a legacy project but might be something more interesting than that.

His solo career since the Beatles dissolved has been one of the more complicated artistic trajectories in popular music history. The commercial success has been enormous and mostly uninterrupted for fifty years. The critical reception has been more varied, swinging between appreciation for his genuine melodic gifts and frustration with a tendency toward the sentimental and the slight. McCartney III in 2020 was received as a genuine late-career return to form, the solo-instrument-playing, unprocessed aesthetic working in his favor in ways it hadn’t always.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane goes further back than any McCartney record has gone, before the fame, before the band, into the raw material that became everything else. Post-war Liverpool, his parents, the teenage friendship with George Harrison and John Lennon before any of them knew what they were going to become. This is private history made public by someone who has been so famous for so long that the private seems almost inaccessible.

Andrew Watt’s involvement as producer is interesting. Watt has developed a specialty in working with aging rock legends, Ozzy Osbourne most prominently, and bringing modern production values to classic voices without losing what makes those voices distinctive. The combination of that sensibility with McCartney’s specific aesthetic gifts is either going to produce something genuinely new or something that sounds like exactly what you’d expect. The single suggests the former.