McCartney: A Life in Lyrics
McCartney: A Life in Lyrics
McCartney: A Life in Lyrics offers listeners the opportunity to sit in on conversations between Paul McCartney and poet Paul Muldoon dissecting the people, experiences, and art that inspired McCartney’s songwriting. These conversations were held during the past several years as the two collaborated on the award winning book, “The Lyrics: 1965 to Present.” Over two seasons and 24 episodes of “McCar…Social links:
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The End
Coming at the end of an intensely creative period, The Beatles’ Abbey Road features some of the most adventurous compositions in the quartet’s catalog. It's fitting then that the album concludes with one of the most inventive and famous medley committed to record. To close season two of “A Life in …
28:35Explicit
Michelle
“Michelle” from 1965’s Rubber Soul started as a kind of light-hearted party piece. But in McCartney’s quest to turn it into a legitimate Beatles song, he went on a bit of a journey to sound not only like a believable French chanteur but also to expand his approach to bass playing, taking inspiratio…
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Give Ireland Back to the Irish
This episode deals with themes and events surrounding the Northern Ireland conflict. As such, this episode may be traumatic or emotional for some listeners. Paul McCartney doesn’t view himself as a writer of protest songs. But the events of Bloody Sunday sufficiently moved him to use his voice. Ru…
21:12Explicit
Here, There and Everywhere
The breadth of Paul McCartney’s influences is astounding. One of the many surprising places McCartney found inspiration was in the music of his parent’s generation. For 1966's “Here, There and Everywhere”, he found himself looking to write something akin to Fred Astaire’s 1935 classic “Cheek to Che…
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Hey Jude
In 1968 the longest song to ever reach number one on the Billboard charts was Paul McCartney’s epic “Hey Jude”—clocking in at seven minutes and twelve seconds. The song was written to soothe John Lennon’s son Julian amid his parent’s divorce. But as with all great works, it has come to mean somethi…
19:36
A Day in the Life
Paul McCartney and John Lennon had a knack for finishing each other's songs. They collaborated by lending ideas for verses, choruses and middle eights many times over the course of their partnership. 1967’s “A Day in the Life” is one of the most prominent examples of McCartney and Lennon’s collabor…
26:39Explicit
Silly Love Songs
From his earliest days as a songwriter, Paul McCartney was interested in love songs. But by the time of Wing’s 1976 album “At the Speed of Sound” McCartney had become tired of critics suggesting that was all he wrote. And so he wrote the album’s lead single, a defiant anthem about the importance of…
31:20Explicit
Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)
“Drink to me, drink to my health” were among the last words spoken by the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. On somewhat of a lark, Dustin Hoffman challenged Paul McCartney to use those words to write a song – on the spot. McCartney indulged Hoffman and, without hesitation, an early version of “Pi…
23:20Clean
Yesterday
The Beatles’ songbook became standard repertoire for artists to perform almost as quickly as they kicked off “the British invasion.” But one was covered more than all the rest: Yesterday. “McCartney: A Life in Lyrics” is a co-production between iHeart Media, MPL and Pushkin Industries. The series…
30:05Explicit
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer
One day in the car, Paul McCartney heard a BBC production of the absurdist play “Ubu Cocu” by french writer Alfred Jarry. Taken by the rebelliousness of the radio play, McCartney wrote a sweet-sounding tune about a murderous medical student that seemingly lives in the same universe as Ubu: “Maxwel…
20:17Explicit