The studio secrets behind the smash success of Paul McCartney's new No 1 album: JAMES ROSEN reveals how Sir Paul, 83, soliders on

On the UK albums chart, the number one spot this week belongs to The Boys of Dungeon Lane, a record released, in all the usual formats and a few new ones, by a man turning 84 next week.

The man played almost all the instruments, 17 in all. It's his 24th number one album, 9 with a former group, 15 since they split in 1970. These triumphs come 70 years after the man cut his first record: a demo acetate of a song he composed with his school-bus friend in Liverpool, George Harrison, called 'In Spite of All the Danger.'

We've been listening to what the man said our whole lives – and with good reason. Sir Paul McCartney should no longer be thought of, primarily, as an ex-Beatle or survivor of the counterculture but as a singular man for all seasons, one of the great exemplars of his time in how to live.

In his ninth decade Sir Paul strikes a blow for the world's aged with the same good cheer, and murmurs of melancholy, as when the Beatles first struck blows on behalf of the world's youth.

Better still, he reaches this stage without any need for his fans to separate our feelings about the man from our feelings about his art. (Think Roger Waters.)

Maureen Cleave, the late British journalist widely believed to have had a brief affair with John Lennon, publisher of his infamous remark about the Beatles and Jesus, later wrote that of the four Fabs, Paul was 'always the best at real life.'

And in real life, McCartney classily prioritized his family and stayed sane, monogamous, and sober – but for a few poorly-timed possessions of marijuana in Sweden, Los Angeles, and Japan, befitting of his happy-hippie vibe. He became the richest entertainer in Britain yet stayed a good guy, dispelling Balzac's maxim that behind every great fortune there is a crime. Paul only made the world better.

And he stayed beautiful! When a fan robbed the Dungeon Lane street sign from its Liverpool location last week, the cute Beatle posted a direct-to-camera TikTok-style video. 'I've no idea who it was, but I've got my suspicions,' he says as he mock-sneaks off-screen, replica sign in hand, flashing the same winking comic sensibility that has charmed audiences since A Hard Day's Night (1964).

Early reviews of Dungeon Lane have touted its nostalgia. And surely it's in healthy supply here. The leadoff single, 'Days We Left Behind,' presents an acoustic reminiscence of life with Lennon in their Merseyside adolescence.

Another acoustic tune, 'Down South,' recounts hitch-hiking trips with George in 1958-59. 'We'd talk about guitars and rock and roll,' Paul sings softly. 'It was a good way to get to know you/Before we learned to twist and shout.'

Likewise, the upbeat pop gem 'Home to Us' features, for the first time ever, Paul and Sir Ringo Starr, the Beatles' drummer, another emblem of endurance, trading off lead vocals. Still another track, 'Salesman Saint,' chronicles the struggles of McCartney's parents during World War II.

Obscured in the focus on nostalgia is how hard the album rocks, how tough and modern, yet simultaneously retro, the lead guitars sound over Paul's signature Höfner bass lines. 'Lost Horizon, 'Ripples in a Pond,' and 'Mountain Top' offer reminders that this is the same guy who gave us 'Helter Skelter' and 'Smile Away.'

Indeed, this is primarily a guitar album, not a piano album – thankfully, as too much tickling of the ivories sometimes turns Paul into one of the Brontë sisters. Andrew Watt, the 35-year-old American musician and producer who has worked with everyone from Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga to Pearl Jam and Elton John, holds the other key to McCartney's genius, it turns out, and has unlocked it like no one since Jeff Lynne midwifed the killer Flaming Pie (1997).

To savor Dungeon Lane start to finish is to be exposed to heaping servings of all of Paul's storytelling and studio recording tricks: memorable melodies, abrupt time-signature shifts, song fragments strung together to form mini-suites, layered backup vocals, tight beats, strings and horns. Against all odds, from deep within the OctoPaul's garden has come one of his best albums since the end of the Beatles: another product of innate genius wedded to an inexhaustible work ethic.

What to make, then, of the deteriorating state of Paul's live performances – and his insistence on continuing them?

It's not the quality of the instrumentation or a matter of stamina: Paul still plays guitar, piano and bass with great deftness and belts out three-dozen classics from his stints with the Beatles and Wings and beyond. It's the voice. That voice.

I often wonder if Paul, exemplar in the living of life, regrets all the cigs and joints, the frequency with which he conjured Little Richard's scratchy wail, or throat-murdering numbers such as 'Monkberry Moon Delight,' off his masterpiece with Linda McCartney, RAM (1971). One of the surprises on Dungeon Lane is some decent screaming heard here and there. Paul's last great scream was on 'The Pound is Sinking/Hear Me Lover,' an underrated track from Tug of War (1982).

All that wear and tear, and just the natural attritions of aging, have left Paul unable to perform his world-famous creations without inducing cringing among the most loving audiences of his lifetime. It's been a worry since he was twenty-two:

What would you do if I sang out of tune? 

Would you stand up and walk out on me? 

I never walked out but I stopped coming back. I last saw Paul live in 2016 and stopped devoting Talmudic scrutiny to his recent albums. The diminution in his vocal power and range is too hurtful to me; I can't take it. It makes me cry.

Whatever Andrew Watt did in the studio to get around this – an updated wall of sound utilizing robust backing vocals from the likes of Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri, sonic enhancements, the sort of studio voodoo known only to elite music-makers – cannot, it seems, be replicated in live performances on 'SNL' or in mid-sized theatres, such as LA's Fonda, where Paul performed a pair of pop-up gigs in March to promote Dungeon Lane. 

So why does Sir Paul, whose success and longevity owe to nothing if not the maintenance of superlative standards, persist in these sub-par performances? He doesn't need the money, was never thick and hasn't gone senile; he knows his standards are not being met. And yet last October he performed at Las Vegas's Allegiant Stadium for over 70,000 people. 

I used to think it attributable to the same instincts that kept Muhammad Ali in the ring too long: addiction to adoration, the absence of any better idea of how to spend one's days and nights. The irony is that elderly Paul seems to see his ring, the stage, as the safest of spaces for himself.

At last, I think I have alighted upon the true reason. 'You Gave Me the Answer,' Paul said, in one of his delightful Twenties romps, on Venus and Mars (1975) – and it resides in his view of history and his own desires as a fan.

Asked why his set list changes so little – we who attended his Madison Square Garden shows in 1989 heard the exact same closing numbers, and largely the same sets, as attendees of the Fonda shows – Paul has always offered the same explanation: because he knows that's what the fans want to hear, as would he if he were paying to see Paul McCartney perform, whatever his age.

'I get it if he doesn't want to do 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' Paul said recently of his generational comrade, Bob Dylan. 'Maybe he's fed up with that. But I would like to hear it. And I've paid.'

And the reason Paul keeps at it, growling and struggling through 'Got to Get You Into My Life' and 'Maybe I'm Amazed,' as he did at Chicago's United Center last fall, is because he knows several generations of fans are on hand.

It is about casting his shadow, already inescapable in modern consciousness, farther into time.

He knows that a grandchild who saw him perform last year at the age of eight will arrive at Paul's own current age in the year 2100 AD—and they'll be telling their own grandchildren, 'I saw Paul McCartney of the Beatles perform live!'

'Impossible!' the young'ns will say, aware from history lessons that the Fabs' breakout year was 1963.

'But it's true!' the old-timer will counter. 'And he played "Hey Jude!"'

James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the author, most recently, of Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001.