- Editorial:
- PENGUIN
- Materia
- Biography/auto
- ISBN:
- 978-1-80206-422-3
THE LYRICS
MCCARTNEY, PAUL
The Sunday Times bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Year, now in paperbackâPaul McCartney says this is as close as he will get to an autobiography and no wonder â his life is in every line of these songs ... pure joyâ Sunday Times, Book of the Year With seven songs added for this edition: âBluebird,â âDay Tripper,â âEnglish Tea,â âEvery Night,â âHello, Goodbye,â âMagical Mystery Tourâ and âStep Inside LoveâSpanning seven decades â from his early Liverpool days, through the historic decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his long solo career â Paul McCartneyâs The Lyrics has transformed the way artists write about music, pairing the definitive texts of 161 songs with intimate, autobiographical commentaries on McCartneyâs life and music. Arranged alphabetically, these commentaries reveal the diverse circumstances in which the songs were written, how they ultimately came to be, and the remarkable â often ordinary â people and places that inspired them.
Dozens of vignettes re-create the working-class Liverpool of McCartneyâs youth, where delivery boys ran parcels on docks, as in âOn My Way to Work,â and elderly ladies in the neighbourhood inspired âEleanor Rigby.â McCartney also introduces us to his early literary influences, among them Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Allen Ginsberg, as well as Alan Durband, his beloved English teacher, and his mother, Mary, who passed away when he was just fourteen â and whose memory has infused his work ever since. Yet the two most powerful presences in The Lyrics after the author himself are his songwriting partner, John Lennon, and his âGolden Earth Girl,â Linda Eastman McCartney. Here McCartney describes how he met John at a church fête in 1957; their adventures with George Harrison and Ringo Starr in the early 1960s; and how, at the end of the decade, they, and The Beatles, broke up.
Thus began a second act of now more than fifty years, with Linda and family life as driving forces â inspiring songs from âMaybe Iâm Amazed,â written just after the breakup of The Beatles, to the 2012 ballad âMy Valentine,â addressed to McCartneyâs wife and partner, Nancy Shevell McCartney. Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prizeâwinning poet Paul Muldoon, and enhanced by more than a hundred images from McCartneyâs personal archives â including handwritten texts, mementos, and photographs â and seven new song commentaries, The Lyrics is a book for the ages, and the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.