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Paul McCartney has announced a career-spanning book about his life through 154 songs from his back catalogue.
‘The Lyrics’, which is due for release on November 2, will recount the musician’s life through his earliest boyhood compositions, songs by The Beatles, Wings and from his lengthy solo career.
It will also be presented with previously unseen drafts, letters and pictures from his personal archive.
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.
You can view a trailer below.
“More often than I can count, I’ve been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right,” said McCartney.
“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.
“I hope that what I’ve written will show people something about my songs and my life which they haven’t seen before. I’ve tried to say something about how the music happens and what it means to me and I hope what it may mean to others too.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Muldoon, who put the book together added: “Based on conversations I had with Paul McCartney over a five year period, these commentaries are as close to an autobiography as we may ever come. His 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.”
Meanwhile, McCartney recently photobombed a TikTok user who failed to clock her close encounter with the rock icon until she returned home.
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