Paul McCartney was coming off a bit of a rough patch in his career when, in 1989, he re-emerged with Flowers in the Dirt, an album which scored some of the best reviews of his career, in no small part due to the songwriting collaborations with Elvis Costello. One of the songs which required no assistance from ol’ Declan, however, proved to be the strongest on the disc: “We Got Married.” With scorching guitar work from Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, the track’s lyrics are mostly just snappily-delivered couplets (“Going fast / Coming soon / We made love in the afternoon / Found a flat / After that / We got married”), but it features one of those lines so perfect that it makes you wish you’d written it:
It’s just as well love was all we ever wanted;
It was all we ever had.
It’s always struck me as strange that this song was never pushed to album-rock radio, particularly given the Gilmour guest spot, but, to my knowledge, it was never a single anywhere. Talk about your missed opportunities.
