Inside the secret Paul McCartney preview for his unreleased 'The Boys of Dungeon Lane' album
Despite the fact fans attending had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, we've learned a few details from someone who was on the inside
If you were one of about 30 to 40 lucky people in Los Angeles on April 16, 2026, you got invited to a private listening session for Paul McCartney’s unreleased “The Boys of Dungeon Lane,” more than a month before its May 29 release date. The album, which contains 14 songs, is his first solo album in over five years,
The lucky folks went to the historic Capitol Records tower for what they thought was an uneventful private listening party for McCartney’s yet-to-be-released album for a select group of fans.
“They gave us a little goodie bag, a tote bag, a shirt, and stuff like that. And then, we had to sign the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and then put our phones in a Yondr pouch,” an anonymous fan who attended told us.
(If you don’t know, here’s how the Yondr pouch works: Upon entering the phone-free space, your phones are placed inside the pouch. It’s locked while the owner is inside the phone-free space, though they maintain possession of it. If they need to use their phones, they step outside the phone-free zone and tap their pouch on an unlocking base.)
McCartney has used these pouches at concerts since at least last year. That system, such as it is, hasn’t been totally foolproof, at least as far as McCartney’s fans go. Music and video from the Bowery Ballroom concerts last year and the Fonda Theatre shows this year escaped the Yondr lockdown and made their way to YouTube.
So you got your bag, signed the NDA, then what? “ Then they kind of like shepherded us onto these nice vans,” the fan said, “and we drove down (U.S. Route) 101 to the listening party.” To Andrew Watt’s Diamond Dust studio, according to a report in Billboard. Watt, who produced the album, was also in attendance, the article said.
When the group of fans got to the listening location, they saw two chairs at the front of the room. “ I kind of had a feeling he (Paul McCartney) was gonna show up because there was a film crew and everything and it'd be weird just to film people just sitting there listening to an album. ” The small group in the studio for the event included McCartney’s wife, Nancy.
“Then at 7 p.m.,” our source said, “he walks into the room, and it's like Beatlemania in 1964. Everybody like loses their minds.”
There was some banter back and forth while the session was going on, but nobody, got to talk to McCartney during the session on Thursday night, But, “he would react to certain things that we did” in the usual, personable, McCartney way.
The fact the fans had to sign an NDA seems a bit strange after Billboard’s article about the listening session came out Friday morning. “It's really confusing that that Billboard article came out. Everything in that article is in the NDA that we're not supposed to talk about,” our source said, including the fact that, as reported by Billboard, Ringo Starr plays on one track.
Paul McCartney wasn’t the only one promoting music this week. Ringo had a live interview on the web for TalkShop Live on Wednesday to promote his upcoming album, “Long Long Road.” The new one, produced by T Bone Burnett and co-produced by Daniel Tashian and Bruce Sugar, is out April 24. The first single from the album is “It’s Been Too Long.” (See below.) The second track previewed, “Choose Love,” a psychedelic remake of a Ringo song from 2005, sounds better to us than the original, in our opinion. Of the Ringo album’s 10 songs, six were written or co-written by T Bone Burnett, two co-written by Ringo and Bruce Sugar, one written by Ringo Starr, Mark Hudson and Gary Burr and one by Bernie Benjamin and George David Weiss and recorded by Carl Perkins.
But as far as McCartney goes, for those of us who didn’t attend, for the time being at least, it looks like we’ll all have to sit on pins and needles until May 29.