Is Paul McCartney’s Calico Skies a nod to Bob?

There is a common thread that weaves together Dylan and McCartneys most loving and inspired songs.

Flaming Pie, Paul McCartney’s 9th solo album, produced by Jeff Lynne, is widely regarded as one of his strongest. It was released in May 1997, the same year, although 4 months before, Bob Dylan’s career defining Time out of Mind. Flaming Pie came after a four-year gap between studio albums, and at a particularly reflective period in his life. McCartney had not long finished work on The Beatles Anthology, collaborating with George and Ringo on old John Lennon demos “Real Love” and “Free As A Bird”. This communion with the past likely inspired Flaming Pie and certainly the opening song “The Song We Were Singing” was a nod to his friendship and collaboration with Lennon.

About half way through the album there is a beautiful standout acoustic ballad, which actually predates the recording of his previous album, Off the Ground. The song, “Calico Skies,” traces a lineage that includes “Blackbird,” “Mother Nature's Son,” and “I Will” and predates another masterpiece, “Jenny Wren.” McCartney himself said he wanted to write something in the vein of Blackbird that could stand on its own without an arrangement.

The first time I heard the song I recognised the calypso, gypsy feel of the song from somewhere and realised how much it reminded me of Bob Dylan’s “Mozambique.” Both songs feature a near identical guitar figure that slides up and down the guitar neck. Beyond the musical similarity, I found some lyrical ones that stretch out and touch other songs too. McCartney’s “Calico Skies,” a tribute to his wife Linda, even shared some of the same rustic sun-drenched imagery as Bob Dylan’s paean to his wife “Sara,”: ‘Scorpio sphinx in a calico dress.’ Both songs are uninhibited in their expression of love “it was written that I would love you…. I’ll hold you for the rest of my life”/“sweet virgin angel, sweet love of my life.” All are inspired by climate and space. With “Mozambique” it’s care-free, ”the sunny sky is aqua blue,” in “Calico Skies,” it’s about memory and protection. For Paul, Linda brings him sweet visions of her home in Arizona, that she gave him the gift of “life under Calico skies.” For Dylan in “Sara” he lays on a dune looking up at the sky, memories of his children playing in the sand, and Sara, a “radiant jewel.” Both songs conjure up idyllic times, but they’re both songs of environment, of storms and the higher powers of nature that govern all things. Paul McCartney wrote “Calico Skies” during ‘Hurricane Bob’ in August of 1991. For McCartney the storm pushed him toward primitive simplicity. Acoustic music, candlelight and wood fires. In “Sara” Dylan asks “How did I meet you? I don’t know. A messenger sent me in a tropical storm” anticipating the destiny of McCartney’s “It was written that I would love you from the moment I opened my eyes”.

It’s an irresistible coincidence of language that McCartney writes “Calico Skies” during Hurricane Bob. Dylan’s first name is Bob. And “Hurricane” is the opening track on the very same album that contains “Mozambique” and “Sara”: Desire.

There is a thread that weaves together Dylan and McCartneys inspired songs. Mysticism, storms, the inspiration of nature and the environment, of love and of death. The fear of outside forces, and protecting each others secrets.

While the angels of love protect us
From the innermost secrets we hide

It’s as if the spirits McCartney was communing with for “Calico Skies” were the same ones Dylan was reaching in “Sara” and also a decade later in another song, “Dark Eyes.” “Dark Eyes” also features a dominant guitar figure not unlike either “Calico Skies” or “Mozambique.”

In “Dark Eyes,” Dylan “lives in another world where life and death are memorized” which feels like it might be the place songs come from, where McCartney could reach in and write: “Long live all of us crazy soldiers… May we never be called to handle
all the weapons of war we despise,” where Dylan could reach in for the “soldier deep in prayer” or the “fallen gods of speed and steel” where the “glamourous nymph with an arrow and bow” could meet the place where “time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies”

McCartney would echo again those same ghosts in “Jenny Wren” which shares something of “Dark Eyes” visions of a broken world: “She saw poverty, breaking all the home, wounded warriors, took her song away. But the day will come, Jenny Wren will sing, when this broken world, mends its foolish ways.”

Underneath the surface of these songs, what becomes striking is not just shared imagery or occasional musical resemblance. Each song feels like it has been “received” rather than constructed, as if the writer is briefly tuning into a frequency where images of storms, wars, lovers, and soldiers assemble themselves. A shared instinct where abstract shapes and archetypes lie on the horizon ready to form symbolic meaning for the artist. In that shared register, Dylan’s fractured mysticism and McCartney’s melodic clarity are not contradictions but complementary languages describing the same terrain, the fragile space where human feeling meets something larger, older, and beyond full perception.

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