The Lyrics

The Sunday Times bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Year, now in paperback.

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.

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 fete 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.

‘Paul McCartney says this is as close as he will get to an autobiography, and no wonder, as his life is in every line of these songs … pure joy’.