Paul McCartney is one of the most successful songwriters ever — but is he a good lyricist? “Distractions/Like butterflies are buzzing/Round my head,” from his solo song “Distractions”, is a distractingly bad description that makes butterflies buzz for no better reason than alliteration. “Women scream and run around/To dance upon the battleground/Like wild demented horses,” are lines from another solo outing, “House of Wax”. “The song itself gets quite dramatic,” McCartney notes with understatement in The Lyrics.
This two-volume doorstopper with a hefty price tag collects lyrics from 154 songs spanning McCartney’s career. They range from his earliest, “I Lost My Little Girl”, written when he was 14, to last year’s album McCartney III, released when he was 78. Outright clunkers stand out as exceptions rather than the rule. Buzzing butterflies aren’t two a penny; or a dime a dozen, to adopt the moveable mid-Atlantic feast of Macca’s lingo (his Wings song “London Town” takes place on a sidewalk, not a pavement). But the book doesn’t back up the optimistic resemblances made in the introduction by its editor, the poet Paul Muldoon, to WB Yeats, Lord Byron and McCartney’s “fellow lyricist” William Wordsworth.
Next to these purported literary forebears, McCartney’s couplet in “Here Today” about John Lennon’s murder — “I still remember how it was before/And I am holding back the tears no more” — is doggerel. It forcibly glues together a constant memory (“I still remember”) with a contradictory rush of feeling (“I am holding back the tears no more”). But “Here Today” shouldn’t be judged as literature. Verses that read maladroitly on the page are transformed into a moving tribute to Lennon when McCartney sings “Here Today”.
“Nobody listens to the words. It’s just the sound of the song,” was his and Lennon’s philosophy in the early days of The Beatles. How lyrics are heard sets their meaning. The way “love” is stretched out in McCartney’s vocal for “Can’t Buy Me Love”, while “money” is uttered at pace, neatly illustrates the song’s message. It was written in 1964 in the George V luxury hotel in Paris, a city to which McCartney and Lennon had hitchhiked only a few years previously. What money could buy was at the forefront of their minds.
The Lyrics abounds in contextual detail such as that. Each of the 154 songs is accompanied by breezy passages of reminiscence, based on conversations with Muldoon. The text is accompanied by beautifully reproduced illustrations, including personal snapshots, formal portraits and memorabilia. The result is a hybrid of collected lyrics, memoir and picture book, a composite form resembling the all-round character of McCartney’s musicality.
He and Lennon combined the roles of composer, lyricist, instrumentalist and singer. There’s a wonderful photo of them as teenage doppelgängers hunched over guitars in the front room of McCartney’s Liverpool terraced home in 1962 writing “I Saw Her Standing There”. A left-handed guitarist to the right-handed Lennon, McCartney likens their pairing to mirror images. As shown by Peter Jackson’s new Get Back documentary, their telepathic closeness persisted until the very end of The Beatles.
True to the one-upmanship that also shaped their partnership, McCartney presents himself as the bookish one, an avid reader and theatregoer armed with an English A-level (“John never had anything like my interest in literature”). Strenuous efforts are made to crowbar literary influences into place. LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, which McCartney isn’t sure he had heard of at the time, “may well have influenced” The Beatles’ “She Loves You”, he claims. A sardonic version of its refrain comes to mind: yeah, yeah, yeah.
His memory of his father sitting in the next room smoking his pipe and commenting that they should cut the Americanisms by singing “yes, yes, yes,” is a far more telling snapshot of the song’s creation. He and Lennon used to write songs in about three hours, and he doesn’t take much longer as a solo songwriter. “I had this belief that you could throw words together and they would attain some meaning,” he says at one point. Mild stream-of-consciousness surrealism and cartoonish character jottings recur in his work, alongside the romantic sunniness that Lennon mocked during post-Beatles hostilities. McCartney riposted by writing a song called “Silly Love Songs”.
He is unrevealing about his vocal style (“I’ve never really thought much about my voice”), although he shares hitmaker tips (“A shout is always a good song opener”). The closest he comes to self-analysis is linking his songs’ positivity and sentiment to his mother’s death from cancer when he was 14, just before he wrote “I Lost My Little Girl”. The last song in the book is “Your Mother Should Know”, while the final photo shows McCartney as a parent, holding the hand of a daughter when she was a child. Despite its implausible literary pretensions, The Lyrics is a rewarding portrait of an exceptional songwriter.
The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present by Paul McCartney, edited by Paul Muldoon Allen Lane, £75/Liveright, $100, 912 pages
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The Lyrics — how good a writer was Paul McCartney?
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