“The Lyrics” is at times rambling and repetitive, but what fan will not enjoy a meander that feels like a long private audience with one of the Fab Four?
Superficially, “The Lyrics” is a coffee-table book. Sir Paul has arranged 154 favourite compositions alphabetically, with lots of glossy photos. But in the essays that accompany each song, his underlying purpose is to affirm his status as a writer. They are based on 50 hours of conversation with Paul Muldoon, a prizewinning poet, in which Sir Paul reflected on his life, his lyrics and the relationship between them.
His songs are full of allusions. The index includes authors ranging from Edward Lear to Rabindranath Tagore . Echoes of Shakespeare recur. “Lend me your ears” in “With a Little Help from My Friends” is pinched from “Julius Caesar”. Sir Paul says the girl who is “way beyond compare” in “I Saw Her Standing There” harks back to the sonnet about a summer’s day. His link to Hamlet’s near-dying words—“but let it be”—seems more of a stretch.
Some songs are ensembles of voices, such as “Band on the Run” and “Penny Lane” . Others are portraits, such as the solitary woman in “Another Day”, or Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles’ spiritual adviser, in “The Fool on the Hill”. Even when Sir Paul uses the first person, he often inhabits another persona. For “The Long and Winding Road” he pretended to be Ray Charles; mimicking other writers is a habitual “disappearing trick”.
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