When I was a teenager, Paul McCartney was a rather covered, concealed character. His work was everywhere, but when he’d turn up in interviews, he’d deflect and make wisecracks. If someone asked him if he thought the Beatles would ever get back together, he’d always say no, he wasn’t interested. He seemed smug and pleased with himself.
We know now that it was John Lennon who broke up the band, while McCartney had been struggling to hold it together behind the scenes. (You can watch him struggle for 468 minutes in Peter Jackson’s mammoth “The Beatles: Get Back,” now on Disney+.) But in public, McCartney refused to show his vulnerable side.
Even when Lennon was killed, McCartney put up a facade and refused to give reporters what they wanted.
“It’s a drag, isn’t it?” he said, while chewing gum.
At the time people were outraged at his blitheness, but I understand it now. He was thinking, “Why should I perform my grief for you, when you don’t care and I do?”
McCartney has loosened up in the intervening years, but 2021 is the year that McCartney went beyond merely likable. He became downright cuddly.
Earlier this year, in Hulu’s “McCartney 3, 2, 1” series, he gave unguarded and illuminating interviews about his work. In “The Beatles: Get Back,” we got to see that he was actually a pretty decent guy back then, too. And now there’s his new book, “Paul McCartney: The Lyrics,” a 960-page hardcover in two illustrated volumes, in which McCartney tells you the stories behind 154 of his songs.
That’s how many sonnets Shakespeare wrote, so, in literary terms, 154 is a good round number.
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The book aspires to be a kind of autobiography through lyrics, but it can’t be exactly that, because that’s not how McCartney writes. A similar Lennon book would have been autobiographical — e.g., Lennon needed help, so he wrote “Help.” He thought we should give peace a chance, so he wrote “Give Peace a Chance.” But McCartney’s process seems to be less autobiographical than elliptical and unconscious, like sitting there with a guitar and getting struck by lightning. Repeatedly. For more than 60 years.
For fun, I wrote down a handful of my favorite McCartney songs and looked to see what he had to say about them.Each lyric gets its own little chapter, and the chapters are arranged alphabetically. Of “Getting Closer,” he said, “I was probably smoking a little too much wacky baccy at the time.” Also, he liked the word “salamander,” so he threw it in. Of “The Long and Winding Road,” he basically says that there was a winding road, and it made its way into a song, and that he wanted the song to sound like Ray Charles.
When he does say something interesting, it’s usually not what you’d expect. Take “Maybe I’m Amazed” — this is one of the great, and rare, love songs about being in a solid, committed relationship. Most songs are about the courtship or the breakup, but McCartney focuses on the “maybe” in the title and talks about how that shows the “fragility of love.”
He describes “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five” as a “love song about the future.” That is, the guy in the song is saying that no one in the future can lure him away. This thought, about the power of love, occasions a rumination from McCartney about how love is happening all over the world at all times, that people are falling in love in China, that parents are loving their babies in South America, and that animals love each other, too.
When I first started reading “Paul McCartney: The Lyrics,” I wondered, “Is this guy kidding? Why was he talking about all this other stuff? Why couldn’t he just give me the clever anecdotes I expected, like John Lennon always would when getting interviewed in Rolling Stone?”
But the more I read, the more I realized, no, this is actually a good book. If only incidentally, it’s a writing lesson about letting your thoughts run free. But mainly, it’s McCartney doing what he wouldn’t do in the 1970s: He’s opening up.
“Paul McCartney: The Lyrics” is the closest you’ll ever get to being inside McCartney’s head. It’s slightly weird in there, but it’s a familiar place.
The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present
By Paul McCartney
(Liveright; 960 pages; $100)