But at best he's a wonderfully versatile lyricist: troubadour, comedian, elegist, social commentator, pasticheur. Morrison concluded in his review that "Stripped of the music, the words on the page can look random or banal. 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'. The backstories to the songs are often as interesting as the lyrics. 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". Having learned from Craig Brown's recent book that Malcolm Muggeridge came to see the Beatles play in Hamburg, I no longer bat an eyelid at the revelation that in 1964 Paul rocked up unannounced at the door of Bertrand Russell." ĭavid Hajdu of The New York Times noted that "McCartney shows how deeply he is steeped in literary history and how much his output as a songwriter has in common with the works of the likes of Dickens and Shakespeare." He concludes: "Aaaah … we realize: Paul really is a word man, the more literary and cerebral Beatle." ĭavid Kirby of The Washington Post praised the book and said that "Reading The Lyrics is like standing in a master chef’s kitchen as he prepares a dish, adding a dash of this and a spoonful of that and talking to us so winningly that we don’t realize till later that he has withheld an ingredient, one that, because he was so deeply engaged himself, he didn’t know he was withholding." īlake Morrison wrote in a review for the Guardian that the stories recalled by McCartney are unusual and entertaining: Yes, Dustin, he clearly can." He was also impressed by the people mentioned by McCartney: "The index is a reminder of the fact that, having been actively famous for 60 years, Paul McCartney has met everyone he’s had a mind to meet. 'Can you write a song about anything?' Hoffman asked. It's this more than 10,000 hours spent setting himself the eternal puzzle of getting from the beginning of a song to its end that enabled him to dazzle Dustin Hoffman by writing " Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me)" in front of him. David Hepworth of The Guardian wrote that "Whereas the other Beatles wrote fitfully after the group broke up, Paul kept getting out his pencil, taking his guitar into a quiet corner and writing yet another song, less on the basis of inspiration than the feeling that it was a muscle he must use or lose. The book received mostly positive reviews. McCartney has said that he has never kept a diary to recall the past but does have "my songs, hundreds of them, which I've learned serve much the same purpose. McCartney had always previously declined to write an autobiography, recalling that he had been asked "More often than I can count" as "the time has never been right". Muldoon felt that their conversations mimicked McCartney's writing sessions with John Lennon as they were both "determined never to leave the room without something interesting". Muldoon spoke with McCartney over five years in two- to three-hour sessions during the creation of the book and felt that McCartney's "insights into his own artistic process confirm a notion at which we had but guessed-that Paul McCartney is a major literary figure who draws upon, and extends, the long tradition of poetry in English". The book also includes many previously unseen photographs, paintings and handwritten texts. The songs are arranged alphabetically over two volumes. The book consists of McCartney's discussions with Muldoon of the lyrics of 154 of his songs written during his time as a member of the rock bands the Beatles and Wings and as a solo artist. Norton/Liveright in the United States of America and C.H. It is published by Penguin Books Ltd in the United Kingdom, W.W. The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present is a book released in November 2021 by the English musician Paul McCartney and the Irish poet Paul Muldoon. 2021 non-fiction book by Paul McCartney and Paul Muldoon The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present
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