The result is a surprise hit in the shape of a book that could never have been anything but a hit.īecause, of course, he’s still Paul McCartney: Turn to the page laying out the beautiful handwritten lyric of “ Blackbird” - McCartney describes writing it “only a few weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.” - and you remember the magic of the music, the reason the book exists. Writers deal in complexity more ably than simplicity, but Muldoon was able to edit McCartney’s memories into a form that permits both. “I never once had a sense of anything troubling about him.” Perhaps this is why people are responding to “Lyrics”: Like “Get Back,” it’s a jolt of good feelings in a hard year. “He’s a very generous person,” Muldoon said, reflecting on his time with McCartney. As Muldoon told me, “A song lyric is not a poem. The yearning “Hold me - love me” from “ Eight Days a Week,” the obscured but powerfully meaningful “she” and “you” of “She Loves You” - these set new emotional stakes for rock music, both generalizing the emotions of the songs and making them seem fiercely personal to the four Beatles. Muldoon agreed, to an extent - for sheer density of lyrical meaning, he admires Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen - but both he and “Lyrics” are eager to draw out a hidden poetics in McCartney’s words.įor Muldoon, this begins with the uncanny power of the earliest songs: “They had figured out that if one used pronouns in a certain way that it made some kind of very strange connection between them and the people listening,” he said. (His new book is called “ Howdie-Skelp,” a term for “the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn.”) I asked him if that didn’t make him something of a mismatch with McCartney’s lyrics, which are often simple, sometimes, as McCartney says, written on the fly.
#LYRICS PAUL MCCARTNEY FULL#
Muldoon’s own work is witty, full of wordplay, often recondite. “We were very conscious of coming up with something he hadn’t said before.” “It takes the curse of the Beatles bulge” - the predominance of the Beatles despite their brevity - “out of things.” The book’s charming freedom comes from this randomness.
“I was very keen to do it that way,” he said. Muldoon’s masterstroke was to organize the book alphabetically rather than chronologically. It’s already a book that Beatles completists agree holds the most new information to come out about the band in decades. Organized into 154 texts, it’s more like a collaged memoir, covering an incredible amount of terrain: memories of Paul’s practical, loving parents (his father, Jim, would order him and his brother Mike into the streets to pick up horse manure when they were bored), John Lennon’s coruscating Liverpool dreams (‘to go beyond where we once belonged,” as McCartney says), his literary influences from Jarry to Dickens, his deeply happy marriage to Linda Eastman. Muldoon and McCartney met dozens of times between 20, the last few virtually, and together they created something much more than a book of lyrics (in case the idea of a book reprinting the words of McCartney’s 2012 album “ Kisses on the Bottom” doesn’t electrify you). Muldoon is part of a rarefied world he got the job when he went to the opera with McCartney’s editor. 1 book in sales rank on Barnes & Noble’s website.Ī good share of the credit for this must go to McCartney’s unlikely editor and collaborator on the project, Irish poet Paul Muldoon - a writer with his own long list of laurels, including a Pulitzer Prize and professorships at Oxford and Princeton. The book has landed on numerous Best of 2021 lists, been called a “ triumph” in the normally acidic Times of London and a “joy” in the Times of New York.
What’s surprising is how much people love it. That’s not the surprise, though - every legacy artist seems to be offering a similar product now, from Dolly Parton to the Grateful Dead. It’s a big, beautifully designed number in two volumes, clocking in at $100, with hundreds of revealing and surprising pictures. It was a brief window of anonymity: The square where they played is named Beatles-Platz now, and everything McCartney does feels like breaking news, from the long, candid interviews (The Stones? A blues cover band) to his spontaneous composition of the riff to “Get Back” (52 years ago but still news!) in Peter Jackson’s wildly popular new eight-hour documentary of the same name.Īnd yet “ The Lyrics,” McCartney’s collection, published this fall, of lyrics he’s written during those 60 years, somehow snuck up on us. Paul McCartney hasn’t snuck up on anyone for at least 60 years, since the days when you could have walked into a random Hamburg nightclub (the Indra! the Kaiserkeller!) and happened upon the apprentice-years Beatles playing one of their noisy sets. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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