In the last 12 months, Paul McCartney has embarked on a world tour, released a new album, and battled a viral infection that left him hospitalized -- any of which would be enough to make most people start thinking about a vacation. For the indefatigable former Beatle, however, it's all just the prelude to whatever music comes next.

Although McCartney is still in the very early stages of writing for his next project, he recently opened up to Rolling Stone about the music he's been working on, and it sounds as though he might be contemplating a return to the electronic-fueled sounds of his Fireman side project, most recently active for 2008's 'Electric Arguments' LP. Talking about his ongoing tinkering with the Cubase program in his home studio, he explained, "It's incredibly addictive -- I'll just sit there for six hours, until someone has to nudge me and say, 'Go home now.' Normally I work on my orchestral side on that, but someone said to me, 'You know what? That's not technically an orchestral program. It's more of a pop program.' So when I had some time to do nothing, I went in and said, 'Great. I'll start on a dance track or something.'"

Armed with a new sequencer -- technology that, as he reminded his interviewer, he'd used as far back as 1980's 'McCartney II' -- he got to work. "Over a week, I did a couple of tracks, and that reawakened my musical taste buds. I was really happy with those. They were just funky little experimental things, instrumentals," he recalled. "The first one I did was kind of African, so I gave it the working title 'Mombasa.' The next one was faster, and that one I called 'Botswana.' It was a good week. It was funny, I was talking to Joe Walsh about this. He said, 'Yeah, man, that's the best -- when it's for nothing and it's not important and it's just experimental, you have the most fun. It's really good for your soul, that stuff.' And I agree. It was very freeing."

Not that McCartney plans to share any of those new sounds anytime soon. "I've got a lot of songs that I've written, and some that I need to finish," he mused when asked about a timetable. "There's no fixed date, but at the back of my mind, I'll be wanting to clear a few months for me to write up the most likely of the songs that I've got on the boil and figure out how I want to record them and what I want to do with them. But I haven't booked any studio time. It's all there as fun for the future."

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