Paul McCartney The Lyrics

Paul McCartney The Lyrics

A self-portrait in 154 songs, by our greatest living songwriter

Paul McCartney photographed by daughter Mary McCartney in Sussex, England, 2020. © Mary McCartney.

ARTS

Paul backstage in Dublin during his Back in the World tour, 2003. Photographer: Bill Bernstein. © MPL Communications Ltd.

Since writing his first song at the age of fourteen, Paul McCartney’s career has been impossibly prolific and singularly influential. In the 1960s Paul changed the world forever with The Beatles. He didn’t stop there, and has continued to push boundaries, as a solo artist, with Wings, and through collaborations with numerous world-renowned artists. He has received 18 Grammys, and in 1996 was knighted by H.M. The Queen for his services to music. Paul is a dedicated philanthropist, passionately advocating for many causes including animal rights and environmental issues. He’s also a very proud grandfather. Paul’s most recent album Egypt Station was his first ever album to debut at Number One in the US album charts.

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extract

EDITED EXTRACT FROM

THE LYRICS

BY PAUL MCCARTNEY, PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE AUSTRALIA

Here Today

WRITER

Paul McCartney

ARTIST

Paul McCartney

RECORDED

AIR Studios, London

RELEASED

Tug of War, 1982

A self-portrait in 154 songs, by our greatest living songwriter

‘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.’

In this extraordinary book, with unparalleled candour, Paul McCartney recounts his life and art through the prism of 154 songs from all stages of his career - from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present. Arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological account, it establishes definitive texts of the songs’ lyrics for the first time and describes the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now. Presented with this is a treasure trove of material from McCartney’s personal archive - drafts, letters, photographs - never seen before, which make this also a unique visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

We learn intimately about the man, the creative process, the working out of melodies, the moments of inspiration. The voice and personality of Paul McCartney sings off every page. There has never been a book about a great musician like it.

And if I said I really knew you well What would your answer be? If you were here today Here today

Well knowing you You’d probably laugh and say That we were worlds apart If you were here today Here today

But as for me I still remember how it was before And I am holding back the tears no more I love you

What about the time we met? Well I suppose that you could say that We were playing hard to get Didn’t understand a thing But we could always sing

What about the night we cried? Because there wasn’t any reason left To keep it all inside Never understood a word But you were always there with a smile

And if I say I really loved you And was glad you came along Then you were here today For you were in my song Here today

Paul McCartney photographed by daughter Mary McCartney in Sussex, England, 2020. ©Mary McCartney.

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Paul with John Lennon during the Abbey Road cover shoot. Abbey Road Studios, London, 1969. Photographer: Linda McCartney. © Paul McCartney.

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A love song to John, written very shortly after he died.

I was remembering things about our relationship and about the million things we’d done together, from just being in each other’s front parlours or bedrooms to walking on the street together or hitchhiking – long journeys together which had nothing to do with The Beatles. I was thinking of all these things in what was then my recording studio in Sussex. Before it was made into a studio, it was just a little house with a small room upstairs with bare, wooden plank floors and bare walls, and I had my guitar with me, so I just sat there and wrote this.

It started, as it so often does, with finding something nice on the guitar, in this case a lovely chord. I just found that chord and pushed on from that; that was the dock, and I could push the boat out and finish the song.

There’s one line in the lyric I don’t really mean: ‘Well knowing you / You’d probably laugh and say / That we were worlds apart’. I’m playing to the more cynical side of John, but I don’t think it’s true that we were so distant.

‘But you were always there with a smile’ – that was very John. If you were arguing with him, and it got a bit tense, he’d just lower his specs and say, ‘It’s only me,’ then put them back up again, as if the specs were part of a completely different identity.

‘What about the night we cried?’ That was in Key West, on our first major tour to the US, when there was a hurricane coming in and we couldn’t play a show in Jacksonville. We had to lie low for a couple of days, and we were in our little Key West motel room, and we got very drunk and cried about how we loved each other. I was talking to someone yesterday who was telling me that if he cried, his father would say, ‘Boys don’t cry. You mustn’t do that.’ My dad wasn’t like that, but that was the attitude: male people do not cry. I think now it’s acknowledged that it’s a perfectly good thing to do, and I say, ‘God wouldn’t have given us tears if he didn’t mean us to cry.’

I heard somewhere recently, ‘Why can’t men say “I love you” to each other?’ I don’t think it’s as true now as it was back in the 1950s and ’60s,

but certainly when we were growing up you’d have had to be gay for a man to say that to another man, so that blinkered attitude bred a little bit of cynicism. If you were talking about anything soppy, someone would have to make a joke of it, just to ease the embarrassment in the room. But there’s a longing in the lines ‘If you were here today’ and ‘I am holding back the tears no more’, because it was very emotional, writing this song. I was just sitting there in that bare room, thinking of John and realising I’d lost him. And it was a powerful loss, so to have a conversation with him in a song was some form of solace. Somehow I was with him again. ‘And if I say / I really loved you’ – there it is, I’ve said it. Which I would never have said to him.

It’s a very charged experience to perform this song in concert. It’s just me and a guitar. In the current show, I do ‘Blackbird’ and then ‘Here Today’, and I’m stuck in the middle of a great big arena with all these people, and a lot of them are crying. It’s always a very sentimental, nostalgic, emotional moment.

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