FEATURE:
Paul McCartney at Eighty
IMAGE CREDIT: Penguin Books/Paul McCartney
Seven: The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present: The Essential Music Book of 2021
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PRIOR to exploring…
IMAGE CREDIT: Penguin Books/Paul McCartney
aspects of Paul McCartney’s career with The Beatles, Wings, solo and other areas of his professional and personal life, one of the things that I wanted to discuss in the run-up to his eightieth birthday in June is his award-winning lyrics book. The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present is not only an essential purchase for any fan of his work. Anybody with even a passing interest in music and lyrics should get this book. The genius songwriter notating and commenting on some of his favourite tracks:
“In this stunning, intimate self-portrait from one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Paul McCartney traces his life from boyhood to the present day through the lyrics to 154 iconic songs, together with captivating commentary and never-before-seen photographs, drafts and letters.
'More often than I can count, I've been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right. The one thing I've always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I've learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.'
Championed by our booksellers from the moment of its publication, The Lyrics represents the defining literary statement from Britain’s greatest living songwriter. Through 154 career-spanning songs – from his iconic work in The Beatles and Wings to the restless creativity of his solo output - Paul McCartney unveils his unique songwriting process through endlessly fascinating background notes and considered critical evaluation. Written in collaboration with acclaimed poet Paul Muldoon, this mighty volume contains the lyrics to songs which have soundtracked millions of lives across the globe and stand as some of the touchstone cultural achievements of the past 75 years.
But The Lyrics is more than an addictively insightful window into the craft and inspiration of a rock legend. Boasting a huge number of never-before-seen images from McCartney’s personal archive, it is also a supreme testament to book design and production; a sumptuous slipcased work housing two deluxe volumes that represent a true visual feast. The ultimate adornment to any self-respecting booklover’s shelves, The Lyrics is a once-in-a-generation masterpiece to treasure forever”.
In November, McCartney (alongside author Paul Muldoon, who edited The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present) spoke about the book to Samira Ahmed at the Southbank Centre. I can understand why there was so much sense of event and the grand about a book. Perhaps the greatest-living songwriter (and, to me, the greatest ever), people wanted to know more about these songs that have been a part of our lives. As the price of the book is coming down, this is more of an investment! In decades to come, we will be talking about The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. The 154 songs that are in there covers his earliest Beatles work and later cuts. It is an amazing book that explains so much about his thought process and inspirations. A while ago, to promote the book. McCartney answered questions from fans relating to particular songs:
“PM.com: Greg on Twitter asks: In the process of putting the book together, were there any lyrics or memories that came back to you and reminded you of a time you’d forgotten?
Paul: It wasn’t really a forgotten memory, but revisiting the first song I ever wrote ‘I Lost My Little Girl’ was interesting. It kind of turned into a therapy session, because I thought I was happily writing a little pop song when I was fourteen, but if you look at the timing of it I had just lost my mother. When you think about that, the song seems to have a much deeper meaning that I hadn’t noticed before: the possibility of it being subliminally written about her.
I’ve always said ‘Let It Be’ was written after dreaming of my mum, but some of the lyrics from ‘Yesterday’ might have been to do with my mum as well. Then there were surprising memories that would come out, like when I got into talking about John and was reminded of the hitchhiking trips we’d taken as kids, and with George. I think the whole process of analysing the songs took me to stuff that I hadn’t thought of recently - not because I didn’t want to, but because there was never a clue, never a prompt, never a trigger to think about those things.
That was the interesting thing about making this book. I had to go back in my memory to see how I’d written that song, why I’d written it and any interesting side stories. It became about more than just the songs: it became the memories that the songs evoked. It was a nice process, actually. Better that being with a psychiatrist!
PM.com: Rory on Facebook asks: When you were deciding which songs to include, did you go through it chronologically, in order the songs were written?
Paul: I never worked out Paul Muldoon’s system, but he would appear with a sheet of paper and would say, ‘Let’s do these today!’ It was always good fun, because really it was just a couple of friends sitting and talking. And the more we got to know each other, the more we talked about the act of writing, what with him being a well-known poet. We had a lot of things in common and were always asking each other, ‘How do you start a song?’ Or, ‘How do you start a poem?’ And I would tell him what I did and he would tell me what he did.
IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon and Paul McCartney writing together in 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: Linda McCartney/Paul McCartney
PM.com: That leads on quite nicely to our next question from Val on Instagram: What is your songwriting process, and do you follow a formula?
Paul: It is a very interesting process, songwriting, and to be honest I don’t know anything about it! I always tell my students in LIPA that, because it’s not like building a car or fixing a television, it’s something that is very different each time you do it so you never learn a set of rules. In fact, you don’t want to learn a set of rules because that’s what keeps it interesting! The minute you know how to do a thing it kinda spoils it.
I remember people used to ask me and John, ‘What’s the formula? Who writes the words and who writes the music?’ And we would say, ‘There is no formula and if we ever found one, we’d reject it.’ There is this idea of discovery when you’re making music, especially when you’re not formally trained but you’re having to produce something that is professional. Nobody’s told you how to do it, so you’re just doing it out of love. For me and John we thought, ‘Oh yeah – we should have a riff at the beginning of this!’ But nobody ever said to us, ‘You should have a riff at the beginning of songs’.
I was talking to Jeff Lynne from ELO once and he said, ‘We just made it all up, didn’t we?’ It’s absolutely true! Sounds a little bit bland, I suppose, but it’s the absolute truth - all the people and all the groups from my generation were very untrained, but we were just passionate about what we did.
PM.com: The next question is from James on Twitter: If you had to pick only one song from your Beatles days, Wings days and your solo days to best showcase each band to curious aliens who had no idea and wanted to learn about you, which ones would you choose?
Paul: It’s always very hard to narrow down favourite songs, so what I do is just make a guess. What comes to my head for The Beatles would be ‘Yesterday’ – I’d say that was an important moment. But then again, my inner voice says, ‘What about ‘Hey Jude’? What about ‘Let It Be’…?’ So it is a very difficult question to answer. But I’ll plump for ‘Yesterday’.
For the Wings period I’ll go for ‘Band on the Run’, although I’ve just heard recently the song ‘Arrow Through Me’ is really getting all sorts of attention, so maybe the aliens would like that! I always liked it myself as a song, but it’s obviously been played somewhere recently and people are going mad on the streaming. That’s another lovely aspect of writing songs - you do something and think it’s of its time, and then years later it gets put in a film soundtrack or something and there’s suddenly a big uptake. I remember ‘Blackbird’ was in the film Boss Baby - it’s an animation film for kids - and parents would come up me and say, ‘You know my kid’s favourite song of yours? It’s ‘Blackbird’!’ It is great that this young generation is getting into the song. I wrote it so long ago and it’s resonating with them now – it’s quite amazing, it’s very gratifying. But anyway, that aside, let’s say ‘Band on the Run’ would be my choice for Wings.
Then for my solo period I would go for ‘Coming Up’ from McCartney II.
Before wrapping up, it is worth sourcing a critical review about the best music book of 2021.The Guardian were among those who provided their opinion on McCartney’s opus. Even if you are a casual fan of his work, it makes for immersive and compelling reading:
“Numerous biographies have traced the origins of Beatles songs. This is the McCartney version. Spread over two lavish volumes and more than 900 pages, and supplemented by memorabilia from the million-plus items in his archive (photos, posters, paintings, jottings and letters), the book came about through conversations with the poet Paul Muldoon: 50 hours of them, in 24 sessions between 2015 and 2020, covering 154 songs. On the face of it, the two Pauls have little in common: one a complex poet, the other a pop star. But they share an Irish heritage. And a few of McCartney’s rhymes (pataphysical/quizzical, Edison/medicine) wouldn’t look out of place in a Muldoon poem. At any rate the two hit it off. Though Muldoon has edited himself out of the text, you can sense him in the background, prompting and prodding. In effect the book becomes an autobiography, with Muldoon playing the part that Dennis O’Driscoll played in the interviews that became Seamus Heaney’s autobiography, Stepping Stones.
The biggest influence on McCartney’s music was the death of his mother, Mary, when he was 14. He used to deny that she lay behind the words of Yesterday (“Why she had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say”) but now accepts she must have been. He wrote more directly about her in the year she died, 1956, in I Lost My Little Girl, a song not released till 1991. And she is namechecked (“When I find myself in times of trouble/Mother Mary comes to me”) in Let It Be, a phrase she liked to use and one that also appears in Hamlet, which McCartney read at school. A midwife in life, she was also a midwife in her afterlife, helping to deliver some of his finest songs.
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney during the recording of Egypt Station (2018)
McCartney has similarly fond memories of his trumpet-playing father, whose love of crosswords he compares to his own approach to writing songs. When he sat down with Lennon – two guitars, two notepads, two pencils – they would have a song written within three hours: “After that your brain goes a bit.” You’d think there must have been sessions when nothing came off but he doesn’t remember any.
He talks a lot about Lennon, nostalgically and with affection (“I still have him whispering in my ear after all these years”), and is keen to emphasise that they ended on good terms; at their last meeting “we talked about how to bake bread”. Harsh words were exchanged when the Beatles broke up, with the acerbic John scornful of Paul’s taste for “silly love songs”, to which he retaliated by writing a song called Silly Love Songs. But till the breakup their differences were productive: “I could calm him down and he could fire me up.” They mirrored each other, John with his right-handed guitar, Paul with his left-handed one. And their tug-of-war rivalry produced brilliant harmonies. “We thought of ourselves as Lennon and McCartney from early on,” he says, a double act like Gilbert and Sullivan or Rodgers and Hammerstein.
The lyrics he wrote as a solo artist and for Wings are included here too. And many aspects of his offstage life are discussed along the way: his pacifism (which began after he met Bertrand Russell), vegetarianism, bird-watching, parenting, painting (which took off after a chat with Willem de Kooning) and unapologetic cheeriness (“it’s OSS: Optimistic Song Syndrome”). All kinds of music influenced him, Cole Porter as well as Little Richard: “No one thought it at the time but we were really big fans of the music that came out of our parents’ generation.” But the real revelation is how much he took from books – “intertextuality as they call it in posh circles”. Among the writers he alludes to are TS Eliot, George Orwell, James Joyce, Philip Larkin, Harold Pinter, Adrian Mitchell (“a good friend”), Eugene O’Neill, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Sean O’Casey, Charles Dickens, LP Hartley and Louis MacNeice. And though the tone of the book is conversational, Muldoon’s editing ensures that it’s also quote-worthy: “Writing a song is like talking to a psychiatrist”, “The vignette is really my stock in trade”, “It’s not so much that I compose songs, they arrive”.
The most startling such arrival was Yesterday, the tune of which was in his head when he woke up one day and which seemed very familiar; only when he played it to others did he realise it existed only in his head. Getting it down, he used dummy words: what became “Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away” began as “scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs”. The backstories to the songs are often as interesting as the lyrics. With Ticket to Ride he and John were also thinking about a trip they’d made to Ryde, on the Isle of Wight; Blackbird, with its “broken wings”, was written after the assassination of Martin Luther King; “Hey Jude was originally Hey Jules and written for the young Julian Lennon after John had divorced Cynthia; the portrait of a community in Penny Lane took its bearings from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood while She’s Leaving Home “was almost like a shooting script for the Wednesday Play”.
A book that everyone needs in their lives, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present is definitely the finest music book of last year. It ranks alongside the very best. As people wonder whether Paul McCartney will write a memoir soon, I think his lyrics book is as revealing and autobiographical as you can get. It definitely gives you an insight into his experiences and songwriting past. Without doubt, Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present is…
A genuine masterpiece.