Welcome to McCartney: A Life in Lyrics

Welcome to "McCartney: A Life in Lyrics". This podcast will take you into the mind of one of the greatest songwriters of all time: Paul McCartney. The result is a combination master class, memoir, and improvised journey with one of the most beloved figures in popular music. Each episode focuses on one song from McCartney’s iconic catalog – spanning early Beatles through his more recent solo work. McCartney, together with his friend, the poet Paul Muldoon, dissects the people, experiences, and art that inspired his songwriting. Season One drops weekly starting October 4th, and features the stories behind songs like Eleanor Rigby, Let It Be, Band on the Run and many more. Subscribe now.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I wanted to become a person who wrote songs, and
I wanted to be someone who's life was in music.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
I'm Paul muldoon and you're listening to McCartney a life
in lyrics. I'm a poet, a lover of the lyric,
poem and the song lyric. And over the past several
years I've been fortunate to spend time with one of
the greatest songwriters of our era.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
And will you look at me?

Speaker 3 (00:36):
It's happened.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
I'm going on to I'm actually a performer, I'm I
actually am a songwriter. My god, well that.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
That crypt hoy, That is Sir Paul McCartney. Together we
worked on the Lyrics nineteen fifty six to the Present,
which looked at more than one hundred and fifty tracks
from McCartney's songbook.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Letter. You can't really talk about music because it's music.
It's purposely not talking. It's playing it sounds, you know,
So it's quite nice, it's quite liberating. Things slip out

(01:21):
like they would in a session with a psychiatrist.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
It took us a long time to get through the
songs we included in the book, and we recorded many
hours of conversations drawing our details from McCartney's memory and
hidden meanings from the music.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
Well, the book on me this mon my head was
in the world. It was like going back to an
old snapshot album, looking back on work I hadn't thought
much about for quite a few years.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
For most of the conversations, we were sitting across from
each other, looking at print outs of.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
The lyrics behind the shelter and the middle of around
in the selling poppies from Funnily enough, a lot of
Americans thought she was selling puppies. I say, puppies. There's
another interesting image, a tray full of puppies, and now
she's sell poppies. I now she feels as interesting to

(02:27):
play she is. Anyway, that's very sort of sixties did
gees anyw.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
We never thought anyone would hear these tapes, most of
which were captured on small recording devices placed on the
table in front of us, or occasionally we recorded over
video chat. You might hear the clinking of teacups, doorbell chimes,
or us chatting over lunch. We were just logging the stories,

(03:04):
preparing for the book and getting to know one another.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
And at the top of the page, I've written another
Leonard McCartney original.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Yes, so you already had a sense even though you
were what sixteen, you had a sense of your being
a teen and that you will have a future.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah. I think it was more a sort of wish
than a sense. It's more in this thing if you
visualize it in my come Truely.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
When we listened back to the tips, we realized there
was something very special happening in these conversations. They were,
in a sense, an oral history of popular music.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
And sometimes when I'm singing, I'll be for to get
that little voice.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Oh it was McCartney unfiltered.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
It helps me reach a place that's just yes.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Many times over the years, Paul McCartney has been asked
to write his autobiography. It's a request he's always denied,
never feeling it to be the right time. But as
we ventured out on this journey, line by line, it
became clear how much of McCartney's biography is indeed embedded

(04:43):
in the lyrics.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Has this Liverpool sprung from its people?

Speaker 2 (04:47):
I have the people sprung from Liverpool, going all the
way back to his childhood in Liverpool.

Speaker 3 (04:53):
Is so sorry, uncal.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Clouds work with my dad in Cotton firm, and they
would get pissed. A lot of the uncles were referred
to as piss artists. They drink a bit. Yeah oh,
Cloud would stand on the table and recite the Bible
summaris shit, you know, keep everyone straight in the way

(05:26):
of the light.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Even if the lyrics aren't strictly autobiographical, every song in
McCartney's repertoire is tied to vivid memories, his initial inspiration,
his writing process, his performances.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Hey hey ha ha ha hey.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
And then there were the meanings that snuck their way
into the lyrics, the strange echoes and insights of which
McCarry and he wasn't aware when he put pen to paper,
but has since come to recognize in his own work.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
Yesterday, all my trouble seems so far. I mean, the
fact that I dreamed the song yesterday leads me to
believe that it's not just quite as cot and dried
as we think it is. And so I say, you know,
you just throw some words in a bowl and then

(06:30):
pull them out. They will achieve some sort of resonance.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
Throughout our talks we also realized how much we held
in common. We both lived our childhoods in black and
white and watched the world change into technicolor.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
Yourself in a bone.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
On a river. Boy, were you lucky to grow up
in that, with that transition from black and white to color?

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yes, but you were inactive for some that that's one
of the reasons why it did go to the color
was because of you.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
It's true. I mean, obviously I see how it happened
to me, not realizing that in me expressing how it
happened to me, I was making it happen.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
We went song by song, but as you will hear
our conversations often spread from the songs themselves. As McCartney
reflected on the lyrics that tell the story of.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
His life, I'm a coat and grab my hat because
it's an experiment, an ongoing experiment. As you follow the
trail of redcruns, you're surprised, often to find yourself in
the next line.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic
figures in popular music.