“How far back would you like to go?” Paul McCartney asks as we sit side by side on a small sofa in his office overlooking London’s Soho Square. The space carries a deep, resinous scent with something faintly churchlike in the air. A large green glass candle rests on the windowsill, and beyond it plane trees shimmer in the bright early afternoon light.

McCartney purchased the building in 1974, and it has long housed his publishing company and various creative ventures. On another floor, members of his team examine prints of photographs taken by his late wife Linda, laid out carefully across a boardroom table. An assistant organizes a bagel delivery, while somewhere in the compact lift a trolley of glassware rattles toward the kitchen, the cheerful clink echoing through the building.

We are talking about the earliest sounds he can remember — what Seamus Heaney once described as “linguistic hardcore,” the unconscious bedrock of noise that shapes the ear. McCartney’s 18th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, has been introduced as a collection of rare glimpses into memories he has not previously shared. It is filled with vivid sonic details: skylarks overhead, the whistle of a distant train, the hiss of a bus braking at a stop. Yet the record is no soft-focus exercise in nostalgia. Instead, it feels exploratory and spirited, alive with guitar-driven energy.

He pauses, thinking. “Now we’re entering dangerous territory,” he says with a grin. “I have this feeling I can remember being born. Highly dubious — very dubious. But I see white tiles and chrome instruments and hear sounds…” He shakes his head. “It’s probably nonsense. Almost certainly. An imagined memory! And I was delivered with forceps.” He smiles mischievously. “I don’t quite know what that involves. I suppose they pulled me out with something like pliers.”

He returns to the theme of sound. “There are so many memories,” he says. “We could be here all afternoon.” Running inside at infant school. Standing at 10 years old on Western Avenue in Speke, perched on the grass verge of a dual carriageway, listening to girls chat while one remarks, “You’ve got great eyelashes!” There were family singalongs — Carolina Moon, Red, Red Robin, Bread and Butterflies — and jokes told by uncles, remembered now only for a punchline: “Repartee.” He recalls the first time he ever heard the word “ubiquitous.”

“Loads of memories,” he says softly. “Very deep ones. Probably meaningless to anyone else.”

And yet, in the life of Paul McCartney, almost nothing is treated as meaningless. As one of the defining songwriters of the modern era, every fragment of his 83 years has been examined. Countless books chronicle the Beatles’ story. Podcasts, fan forums and expansive documentaries revisit their journey in minute detail. Multiple film and television projects are in development, revisiting the band’s rise. And then there are the songs themselves — so woven into everyday life they feel less like recordings and more like relatives.

Nearly everyone feels they know McCartney, which makes sitting across from him faintly surreal. How should one act? Today, he makes it simple. Dressed in a blue plaid shirt and dark jeans, he files his nails casually as I arrive. When I compliment the new album, he replies in a warm, almost teasing tone: “Well, you can come again.”

He says songwriting rarely begins with a plan. “I don’t really know what’s going to come out,” he explains. Revisiting his past was not a calculated decision; it simply offered stories to tell. Dungeon Lane — the place referenced in the album title — was once a birdwatching spot near the house on Ardwick Road where his family moved in 1950. “Rows and rows of council houses,” he says. “But they were great houses.” An indoor toilet marked an upgrade, and there was enough space to feel proud when relatives visited.

His mother worked as a midwife, his father as a cotton salesman. Luxuries were scarce, but there was an upright piano, a radio and a carpet where he could lie listening to both. “The radio was an amazing source of information and music,” he says. “The BBC did all that brilliantly. I’ve always loved it.” The album’s first single premiered on BBC Merseyside.

He remembers short classical pieces that seemed to burrow into his brain. Even now he can recite names from the closing credits: “Orchestra conducted by Harry Rabinowitz…” He relishes the memory. “Radio lets your imagination run wild.”

He loved radio dramas and comedy sketches — the power of voices without images. In the late 1960s, driving from London to Liverpool in his Aston Martin, he tuned in to Alfred Jarry’s surreal play Ubu Cocu. “I loved it,” he says. “It was outrageous.”

That broadcast would later influence Maxwell’s Silver Hammer on the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road. “The radio handed me that,” he reflects. “I might never have found it otherwise.”

Radio also delivered rock’n’roll. Programs like Record Round-up introduced him to Ray Charles’s What’d I Say? “I remember thinking: what is this?” he says, smiling. “Again, radio blowing your mind.”

The first time he heard himself on air was in 1963, driving past the Grafton in Liverpool when Love Me Do played. “I remember exactly where I was,” he says. He did not stop the car. “I just kept driving, thrilled. It meant something.”

Years later, in conversation with the poet Paul Muldoon, McCartney revisited more than 150 of his lyrics, including Penny Lane. The song drew on a Liverpool street where he, John Lennon and George Harrison once changed buses. Writing it was a shared act of remembrance. “John knew exactly what I meant,” he has said. “It was something we could revisit together.”

Many tracks on The Boys of Dungeon Lane return to similar landscapes. Writing about them now, without Lennon, carries a different weight. Their creative dialogue had already shifted before the Beatles split in 1970, and Lennon’s death in 1980 ended it completely. “My collaborator was one of the best writers of the century,” McCartney says quietly. “Of course you miss him.” Still, when he writes about a place from their youth, he can imagine Lennon’s response. “I can sort of hear him saying, ‘That’s good — keep that.’”

“But that’s life,” he adds. “You lose people.” He recalls producer George Martin once warning him that with age comes the steady loss of friends. Having lost both Lennon and Harrison, he feels that absence keenly.

A track called Down South remembers the days the three of them hitchhiked together from Chester Road. “George would’ve known exactly what I meant,” McCartney says. “So would John.” The sadness lingers, but he steadies himself. “Everyone misses them,” he says. “That helps a bit. It’s life. It’s what we’ve got.”

His collaborator on the album is producer Andrew Watt, 35, known for work across genres and generations. Though Watt never walked Chester Road, he encouraged McCartney to lean into specific details. When McCartney wondered whether mentioning Forthlin Road would resonate, Watt reassured him: everyone has their own version of that place.

Watt admits he was nervous before their first session, scrambling to find left-handed guitars in case McCartney needed one. “Just in case,” he laughs. And indeed, McCartney asked for one.

“I was explaining how songs can start in all sorts of ways,” McCartney says. “Sometimes I just put my fingers on the piano and see what happens.” He tried the same with a guitar Watt handed him. “That’s a wonky chord,” he declared. He didn’t know its name, but it became the opening of As You Lie There.

Even now, he claims he doesn’t know what the chord is. Picking up a nearby guitar, he runs through familiar chords before landing on the mysterious one. “It’s got a bit of strangeness,” he says. “A little romance. Stranger than fiction.”

Watt describes working with McCartney as the greatest experience of his life. Despite his stature, McCartney carries little ego. “He meets you halfway,” Watt says. “He lifts you up while coming down to your level. It feels open.”

The sessions were emotional. Days We Left Behind moved Watt to tears, while Home to Us, a duet with Ringo Starr, evolved into something fierce and loud. McCartney wanted toughness in the sound. After attending an Oasis concert mid-recording, he returned inspired by the sheer volume. “Turn it up beyond 11,” he joked. He wanted that scale.

Back on the sofa, our conversation drifts from guest appearances to memories of 1950s housing, from Liverpool’s bus routes to thoughts of his parents caring for him during wartime. He cannot help but connect those memories to modern conflicts, imagining families living under the threat of bombs.

That tension runs through Dungeon Lane: rent unpaid, cupboards bare, families enduring hardship. The past feels uncomfortably close to the present. McCartney is perplexed by much of contemporary politics and technology. “You wouldn’t have imagined some of this,” he says.

Yet he remains hopeful. “Most people I meet are decent, family-oriented,” he says. “We share more values than we think.” When writing love songs, he reminds himself that love and family are universal experiences. “It’s human. So I believe we’ll get through.”

He admits he copes by tuning out much of the noise. One irritation, however, provokes him: internet cookies. “Everyone clicks ‘accept,’” he says. “I look for ‘reject all.’”

At a recent anniversary event for the technology company Apple — distinct from the Beatles’ former label of the same name — he teased an executive about constant phone updates. “I just learned how it works!” he protested. “It’s my device. It should do what I want.”

He shows me a photograph of hydrangeas on his phone. “Mostly, it’s a camera for me,” he says. He enjoys emojis too — the thumbs up, a cowboy face, and a sequence of flexed arm, heart, flexed arm. “Looks a bit like a person,” he says, pleased.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is out now via MPL/Capitol.