Paul McCartney has spent six decades carrying a songwriting catalog that could make most Spotify playlists quietly delete themselves. As one of two surviving Beatles alongside Ringo Starr, the 84-year-old still occupies a strange position in modern music: living legend, active performer, and occasional elder statesman watching TikTok dances invade pop from the sidelines.

Streaming algorithms have rewritten discovery, genre borders have melted, and breakup anthems now arrive by the truckload. Yet when McCartney was recently asked whether any current song made him jealous enough to wish he had written it. His answer arrived without a drumroll.

During Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, Paul McCartney was asked whether he ever hears contemporary music and thinks, “I wish I wrote that.”

“No. Not really. Not really,” he replied. That did not mean the former Beatle had entered full grandfather-yells-at-Spotify mode.

McCartney specifically praised Billie Eilish, calling her “cool,” while explaining that her songwriting simply does not spark that particular creative envy.  His reasoning became wonderfully McCartney-specific. Plenty of current songs revolve around breakups, while he is happily married to Nancy Shevell.

Apparently heartbreak music becomes harder to covet when domestic life is going rather nicely.

McCartney then reached backward for an example that once did trigger that songwriter jealousy. Billy Joel’s songs made him think he could have written something in that emotional and melodic lane. Then came the tiny grenade.

“Nowadays, some of them are very banal,” McCartney said, before joking about repetitive lyrics and performing the accompanying TikTok dance himself. 

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And soon, Hollywood will attempt the considerably scarier task of recreating the songwriting partnership that helped turn McCartney into McCartney.

Sam Mendes is currently deep into The Beatles: A Four-Film Cinematic Event, an enormous Sony project telling the band’s story through four interconnected movies, each centered on a different Beatle. Paul Mescal plays McCartney, Harris Dickinson portrays John Lennon, Joseph Quinn becomes George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan takes on Ringo Starr.

Mendes is directing all four films, with Apple Corps, McCartney, Starr, and the Lennon and Harrison families granting access to the Beatles’ life stories and music. Production is already well underway. The four leads were spotted recreating the famous Abbey Road crossing in August, and producer Pippa Harris revealed this week that filming had reached day 180. 

All four films are scheduled to hit theaters during April 2028. Harris says audiences will be able to experience them across the same month, with each story designed to stand alone while building into a larger portrait of the band. So while McCartney may struggle to find a modern song he wishes he had written, Hollywood is preparing four entire movies about the songs he actually did.

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What do you think about Paul McCartney calling some modern music “very banal”? Let us know in the comments.