The Sunday Times bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Year now in paperback 'Paul McCartney
says this is as close as he will get to an autobiography and no wonder - his life is in every
line of these songs ... pure joy' Sunday Times Book of the Year With seven songs added for
this edition: 'Bluebird ' 'Day Tripper ' 'English Tea ' 'Every Night ' 'Hello Goodbye '
'Magical Mystery Tour' and 'Step Inside Love' Spanning seven decades - from his early Liverpool
days through the historic decade of The Beatles to Wings and his long solo career - Paul
McCartney's The Lyrics has transformed the way artists write about music pairing the
definitive texts of 161 songs with intimate autobiographical commentaries on McCartney's life
and music. Arranged alphabetically these commentaries reveal the diverse circumstances in
which the songs were written how they ultimately came to be and the remarkable - often
ordinary - people and places that inspired them. Dozens of vignettes re-create the
working-class Liverpool of McCartney's youth where delivery boys ran parcels on docks as in
'On My Way to Work ' and elderly ladies in the neighbourhood inspired 'Eleanor Rigby.'
McCartney also introduces us to his early literary influences among them Shakespeare Lewis
Carroll and Allen Ginsberg as well as Alan Durband his beloved English teacher and his
mother Mary who passed away when he was just fourteen - and whose memory has infused his work
ever since. Yet the two most powerful presences in The Lyrics after the author himself are his
songwriting partner John Lennon and his 'Golden Earth Girl ' Linda Eastman McCartney. Here
McCartney describes how he met John at a church fête in 1957 their adventures with George
Harrison and Ringo Starr in the early 1960s and how at the end of the decade they and The
Beatles broke up. Thus began a second act of now more than fifty years with Linda and family
life as driving forces - inspiring songs from 'Maybe I'm Amazed ' written just after the
breakup of The Beatles to the 2012 ballad 'My Valentine ' addressed to McCartney's wife and
partner Nancy Shevell McCartney. Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul
Muldoon and enhanced by more than a hundred images from McCartney's personal archives -
including handwritten texts mementos and photographs - and seven new song commentaries The
Lyrics is a book for the ages and the definitive literary and visual record of one of the
greatest songwriters of all time.
