• Paul McCartney, 83, revealed on BBC Radio 2’s Tracks of My Years that Prince recorded a cover of the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road” — the 1970 Let It Be ballad — which McCartney didn’t learn about until after Prince’s 2016 death
• “I’m going to ask them [Prince’s estate]. I could make it into something really good,” McCartney said
• He praised Prince’s playing on the recording: “He plays some really good guitar on it” — and described Prince generally as “a wizard”
• The appearance was tied to McCartney’s new solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, during which he also discussed the artists who shaped him growing up in Liverpool

Paul McCartney found out Prince covered one of his songs — and he found out the way most people find things out: someone just told him.

The 83-year-old Beatle appeared on BBC Radio 2’s Tracks of My Years with host Vernon Kay this week, and in the course of the conversation he let slip an anecdote that raises a real question for Prince’s estate. McCartney said that after Prince’s death in 2016, someone mentioned to him that Prince had recorded a cover of “The Long and Winding Road” — the sweeping ballad McCartney wrote that closed out the Beatles’ 1970 Let It Be album.

“I was with some guy a couple of years ago, so it was after Prince had died, and this guy said, ‘Have you heard Prince do "Long and Winding Road"?'” McCartney recalled. “I said, ‘Well no, that’s one of my songs!'”

He’s heard it since. His verdict: “He plays some really good guitar on it.”

As for what happens next, McCartney was direct about his intentions: “I’m going to ask them,” he said of Prince’s estate. “I could make it into something really good.”

Prince’s vault at Paisley Park is famously enormous — thousands of recordings that may never see a commercial release. His estate has shared material selectively since his death, and any decision to put out the “Long and Winding Road” cover would be theirs to make. But McCartney’s public interest in the recording puts a new kind of pressure on the conversation.

During the same interview, McCartney was unambiguous about how he rates Prince as a musician. He called out Prince’s 1986 single “Kiss” as a personal favorite, praising the minimalism of the arrangement: “He took a lot from Hendrix, but he was a great player. It’s just so simple — again to pull that kind of thing off, you can do a kind of simple thing, and it can just sound simple but not great, but his sounds simply great. He’s a wizard.”

McCartney’s appearance on the show coincided with the release of his new solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, in which he traces the music of his Liverpool childhood and the path it took him from the Merseyside docks to global fame.

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