“I’m like, ‘Holy s**t, I have no lefty guitars’”: Andrew Watt’s panic upon learning Paul McCartney was coming to his house for tea
Having a Beatle drink tea in your kitchen must be surreal. But having one teaching you the secrets to one of their greatest hits while doing so? That sounds like a fever dream, even for super-producer Andrew Watt, who experienced it all one fateful afternoon.
Appearing on a new episode of The Howard Stern Show, Watt – fresh from a Grammy win for the Rolling Stones’ album, Hackney Diamonds – recalls: “His manager, this guy named Scott Rodger, who’s a great guy, I told him, ‘I would love to get with Paul [McCartney] some time.’”
“And then right after that, I won the producer of the year at the Grammys. And then I think he told Paul about that, and then Paul was like, ‘OK, I’d love to meet this guy.’ So I just got a text: ‘Paul wants to come over for tea.’”
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“I’m like ‘oh my god, he’s coming to my house.’ So I cannot sleep the night before and I’m literally starting to doze off, and I sit up in the middle of the night [and] I’m like, ‘Holy shit, I have no lefty guitars. I have only right-handed guitars.’ I’m a lefty, but I play right.”
He continues: “I’m like ‘We’re supposed to have tea, but what happens if he wants to play a chord, or wants to show me something?’ I could have Paul McCartney playing guitar in front of me and I won’t be able to. So we start Googling and we find a company that will rent them, so they’re in the house.”
The producer, who was admittedly “tripping out” in anticipation of McCartney’s arrival, says, “There’s going to be a Beatle in my kitchen. How is that something you can fathom?”
After Macca arrived, the conversation soon shifted to Blackbird, one of Watt’s favourite Beatles songs. What followed was a revelation that could only come from the man who created it.
“We started talking about Blackbird, because that is one of my favourite songs ever, and it’s very interesting to play. It’s got a very particular right hand. So I was asking him if I got it right. And he was showing me stuff.”
“‘[McCartney said] ‘You know, the most important part of that song is that you tap your foot while you play it.’ And I’m like, ‘I thought that’s a metronome.’ [Paul replied] ‘We didn’t have metronomes. That’s my foot tapping,’” Watt recounts. “So they actually had his foot mic’d in the studio.”
The post “I’m like, ‘Holy s**t, I have no lefty guitars’”: Andrew Watt’s panic upon learning Paul McCartney was coming to his house for tea appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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