I wanted to become a person who wrote songs, and I wanted to be someone who's life was in music.
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.
And will you look at me? It's happened. I'm going on to I'm actually a performer, I'm I actually a songwriter. My god, well that that.
Cryptor 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.
A 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 like they would in a session with a psychiatrist.
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.
Well, the book on me, this mom 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.
For most of the conversations, we were sitting across from each other, looking at print outs of.
The lyrics behind the shelter and the middle of around 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 play she is. Anyway, that's very sort of sixties did.
Gesny. 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, preparing for the book and getting to know one another.
And at the top of the page, I've written another Leonard McCartney original.
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.
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 true.
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.
And sometimes when I'm singing, I'll be for to get that little voice.
Oh it was McCartney unfiltered.
It helps me reach a place that's just yes.
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 in the lyrics.
Has this Liverpool sprung from its people? I have the people sprung from.
Liverpool, going all the way back to his childhood in Liverpool.
He is so sorry. Uncal 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 shit, you know.
Keep everyone straight in the way of the light.
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.
Hey hey ha ha ha hey.
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.
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 pull them out. They will achieve some sort of resonance.
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, yourself in a bone.
On a river. Boy, were you lucky to grow up in that with that transition from black and white to color.
Yes, you were inactive for some that that's one of the reasons why it did go the color was because of you.
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.
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 his life.
I'm a coat and grab my hat because it's an experiment, an ongoing experiment. As you follow the trail of redcrunds, you're surprised, often to find yourself in the next line.
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.