McCartney Times

The basics of the Beatles story are a matter of public record — cynical John meets happy-go-lucky Paul, then George and, later, Ringo join a group that cranks out song after song for an all too brief period, then the world’s greatest hit-making machine explodes in a welter of personal and business squabbles. And yet, as Adam Gopnik pointed out in a 2016 New Yorker article, “something mysterious remains, and that mysterious thing, as always in the lives of artists, is how they did what they did.”

Till now. With the publication of “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” a massive two-volume collection of Paul McCartney lyrics, at last we know where the songs (at least the ones he wrote or co-wrote) came from. Or let’s say we know as much as we ever will: McCartney’s comments on each of these 154 songs that he wrote either himself or with a partner like John Lennon or, later, Linda McCartney are generous, but they’re also conversational, meaning they are intimate yet incomplete.

Read more, click link below…

Source: The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, by Paul McCartney book review – The Washington Post