Paul McCartney is a vegan and a pacifist, or at least I think he was. Nevertheless, he has just contributed to a song for a new video game called ‘Destiny’ (where you are a Guardian of the last city on Earth) from Bungie and Activision, due on September 9th. I haven’t tried to play a video game for a long time, but watching the trailer of this one tells me how much advanced these things are these days, this looks like a cross between Star Wars and Lord of the Ring, hammering the E into epic, with tons of special effects,… and it has to be violent, thus, like any video game, it will bring its lots of battles and explosive fights. So doesn’t this collaboration sound astonishing for the peaceful Beatle?
According to the NY Times, McCartney got involved with the project in 2010, and Marty O’Donnell (composer and audio director for film, television and video games) proposed that the Beatle would be interested to compose orchestral music which is able to change with the result of the game action of the players. In the past, McCartney has written 4 full-length orchestral scores and several shorter pieces so this makes sense, and over the years, he met with O’Donnell and finally recorded music for the game, as well as a 50-minute orchestral suite.
‘Paul’s one of these guys who just never seems to want to stop developing and moving’, explained O’Donnell to Edge online, ‘so we had a great meeting and started collaborating. And for two years we traded music back-and-forth, met at several studios. We did this session at Abbey Road. I’m really looking forward to getting that out for people to hear because it has… it’s the 50-minute suite that tells its own story that’s within the story of the Destiny universe. It’s written by Mike Salvatori, me and Paul McCartney.’
At first, O’Donnell was wondering whether McCartney would be interested but he was soon reassured: ‘That was one of the things we were quite worried about: would Paul even be interested in a sci-fi shooting game? But he seemed excited about it. He’s played Halo with his grandkids and was… I can’t speak for Paul, but I think he’s pretty excited that he’s stretching into an area he hasn’t stretched before.’ Plus there were some very cool surprises: ‘He brought out his old tape-loop machine – he said the last time he used it was on Sgt. Pepper. So he sent me an entire session where he was playing around with all these tape-loops. We were just thrilled. That [was] the same machine that was on Revolver.’
McCartney also wrote a theme song for the game, which was recorded at Abbey Road with a 120-piece ensemble and directed by Giles Martin, which may be released as a single soon after the game is released. You can already listen to the trailer below, but this doesn’t sound like anything Macca would produce, more like your average sci-fic video game score! I am not sure how the Beatle’s song will fit into this.
