Paul McCartney’s New Album Gets Personal

With a little help from his friends, Paul McCartney has released what he calls his most ''publicly personal'' album, and has just begun a U.S. Tour that will keep him in the public eye through the end of November.

While the former Beatle has been famous for most of his life and given hundreds of interviews, he has usually managed to stick to prepared sound bites, while maintaining a friendly facade complete with wide grin and thumbs aloft.

But in ''chaos and creation in the backyard'' (capitol), his 20th studio album since 1970, the year the fab four broke up, he broaches such topics as recovering from the death of his first wife, Linda, and finding a new love in second wife, Heather Mills McCartney.

In an interview, McCartney said it took a few years after Linda's death from cancer in 1998 to bring those kinds of emotions out publicly.

''It wasn't hard, privately. It's easy to experience it. But, you know, you have to think about how to write this stuff down. It took a little while to find its way into the songs, for the dust to settle. How to make it an art.''

McCartney's first venture after Linda's death, 1999's ''Run Devil Run'', was anything but the emotion-laden, sad album the public was expecting. A tribute to the rockers of Paul's youth, the album was loaded with tunes by Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry and others.

''It was the only way I could go, really, to make that kind of record. And Linda had always said to me, 'you must do a rock and roll album,' which is what I did.''