Wingspan: History (Paul McCartney/Wings, 2001)

I'm just going to come right out and say that nobody really needs to invest in either disc of Wingspan, neither the Hits, nor the History. It's not a bad collection of songs, but it doesn't break any new ground in the Paul McCartney catalog unless you count the throwaway "Bip Bop/Hey Diddle", an inferior lo-fi acoustic medley of two adequate album tracks. Then there's the "playout mix" of "No More Lonely Nights", which is completely unnecessary unless you are abnormally fascinated with the original song.

So what the heck was the Wingspan project? If memory serves me right, it was a "songtrack" for a half-baked documentary on the years from the first McCartney solo album to around the mid-1980's. I originally thought it was highlights from the period between McCartney and McCartney II and the ten-or-so albums in-between, credited variously to "Paul & Linda McCartney", "Paul McCartney & Wings", and even just "Wings" (which is why Apple created the "Album Artist" field so it doesn't wreak havoc with your iPod). However there is some spillover into the "Macca" years with Columbia, so there's no way to neatly describe the scope. It's a interesting period for Paul, who went from Beatle exile to submerging himself in another band identity, but then re-asserting his fame and eventually inflating into a commercial juggernaut. Although it's easy to call the earlier music more earnest than the later stuff, I always find something likable in every McCartney song, even the most gushy AM-radio grade stuff.

Probably due to lack of patience, I broke the set into its two main parts, so here we focus on the History disc (the second one). With a name as big as McCartney, even the "deep tracks" are fairly familiar to most people, though these are certainly not the A-listers. For example, tracks from Band On the Run for Hits would be stuff like "Jet" and the title track, while this disc takes on "Let Me Roll It", "Helen Wheels", and "Bluebird". McCartney, probably by virtue of being a pretty "raw document" in itself, gets 5 tracks, more than any other album, though "The Lovely Linda" is a puff piece and "Maybe I'm Amazed" really deserves to be with the Hits disc. Ram (co-credited to Linda) comes in with three tracks (four if you count the "Bip Bop" medley), making the pre-Wings era very well represented here. Nine of the tracks are Wings era proper, which can mean a lot of things, as the lineup was fairly fluid, but rest assured you get your Denny Laine fix no matter what album. The lackluster Red Rose Speedway and the most hits-heavy Wings at the Speed of Sound are not represented, but otherwise it's a pretty even spread. Finally, the "new" solo era gets a tiny bit of love, with four tracks over three albums, though I'm reluctantly counting the "No More Lonely Nights" remix as a part of Give My Regards to Broad Street.

Basically if you invest in McCartney, Ram, and Band on the Run, you aren't missing anything major here, though I have a soft spot for "Rockestra". Those three albums give you half the tracks here right away. Also, many of the tracks are in their "single edit" form, so listeners may find songs like "Rock Show" a little too truncated for their tastes.