... the anthology is a feast for the eyes. Dyed-in-the-wool Beatles fans will be bowled over by the sheer profundity of unpublished photographs, previously unseen lyrics sheets, journal entries, paintings, and the like. Indeed, The Lyrics easily represents the finest collection of illustrations associated with McCartney's life and work. And it's beautifully rendered, to boot. Drop-dead gorgeous as books go, The Lyrics rivals the finest art imprints, including the handsome limited editions from the likes of Taschen and Genesis ... Readers will enjoy the deep dives into more than 150 songs, and I, for one, was thrilled with the choices ... If The Lyrics has an overarching weakness, it exists in the margins ... there are a series of moments in The Lyrics, often literary in nature, that might seem like—dare I say it?—overreaching ... That's not to say that the attendant anecdotes and off-the-cuff musings are not powerful and affecting. As always, McCartney's asides about his parents are simply lovely ... In its finest moments, The Lyrics brings these key relationships to the fore, emphasizing the role that McCartney's family has always played in his life—and yes, this most definitely includes his created family with the other Beatles and their circle ... fetch me a more exquisite anthology this holiday season? I dare say you won't find one.
... richly illustrated ... there’s nothing like listening to Macca (as McCartney was known in his Liverpool days) talk about the rise of a band composed largely of working-class teens who changed the world forever ... Almost 60 years later, it’s still an amazing story ... Muldoon interviewed him for hours and coaxed out these charming commentaries.
... lavishly prepared ... The books’ title, in its declarative terseness, proclaims the books’ definitiveness. It’s not Selected Lyrics or Paul’s Favorite Lyrics or Lyrics That Remind Paul of a Little Story He’d Like to Share, but just The Lyrics, and it’s misleading. The books provide a carefully curated selection of lyrics: 154 out of the more than 400 songs McCartney wrote or co-wrote on 22 Beatles studio albums and 26 Wings and solo albums, along with singles and B sides ... It would be easy to fill the rest of this review space with the titles of less-than-print-worthy lyrics from McCartney’s vast catalog ... To read over the words to these 154 songs is to be impressed not merely with McCartney’s productivity but with the fertility of his imagination and the potency of his offhand, unfussy style ... makes clear that McCartney has written on a high level long past his Beatles years, and even the weakest lyrics in the books have a character all their own: a feeling of giddy playfulness and unguarded experimentation. They’re a joy to read because they exude the joy their maker took in their making ... The text is loose and ruminative, and it reveals a great deal about what McCartney thinks about life and music, and what he would like us to think about him ... Over and over, McCartney shows how deeply he is steeped in literary history and how much his output as a songwriter has in common with the works of the likes of Dickens and Shakespeare ... While pronouncing his love for Lennon as a longtime friend and creative partner, Paul is pretty rough on him at points in The Lyrics. His main crime is one of omission, passing on opportunities to point out Lennon’s signature contributions to songs they wrote collaboratively ... Yes, we all know that McCartney can’t help defining himself in relation to Lennon. Still, as he shows convincingly throughout The Lyrics, you don’t have to make the other guy out to be an idiot to prove that you’re a genius.
The lyrics you actually read are for the records you don’t know. The majority have lived inside us since we first heard them, in my case for almost 60 years ... Macca rarely resists an upmarket comparison. If one Paul is keen to point out that the intermediary of 'She Loves You' is like the hero of LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, the other Paul is quite happy to agree he may have been influenced by it. In the same commentary, he’s forever reaching back to the England of his boyhood ... Neither lyrics nor commentary will be studied quite as closely as the pictures of Paul looking fabulous for more than 50 years, posing for pre-digital selfies with everyone from the Maharishi to Auntie Jin. In the end, we would as soon look at rock stars as listen to them, and this is as much a picture book as anything. The problem, which only strikes you on lifting the second weighty volume, is how are you supposed to actually read a thing like this? ... there’s no narrative arc to carry you along ... You might think the price tag means it’s aimed at the Christmas stockings of lifers like me. In fact it’s more likely to be picked up and pored over by that army of forty- and fiftysomethings who these days are Paul’s children. They don’t actually remember the Beatles but they can’t imagine a world without Paul McCartney. For them, the book’s absence of chronology will not be an impediment. For them, those thumbs remain aloft for a higher purpose. It’s why he’s here.
... a gravity, reverence and sense of occasion that hasn’t been seen since the Levites rolled out the Ark of the Covenant ... Do the words alone bear scrutiny? Lyrics shorn of music can seem very flat, unless they’re written by WS Gilbert or Cole Porter. McCartney’s elicit a variety of responses. Some, from the Sgt Pepper or Abbey Road albums, are so familiar...that the music plays in your head as you read them. Others are dully prosaic ... His accompanying commentary, McCartney admits, is the closest to an autobiography we’ll get ... There are indeed many genuine insights ... Sometimes [Muldoon] strives for an implausible resonance ... One can perhaps detect Muldoon’s hand here, guiding a song towards significance ... We’re given some lovely details about McCartney’s family ... he sometimes writes as if naivety is his default setting. This vast, absorbing book is studded with McCartneyisms that make you rub your eyes[.]
Though Muldoon has edited himself out of the text, you can sense him in the background, prompting and prodding ... though the tone of the book is conversational, Muldoon’s editing ensures that it’s also quote-worthy ... The book won’t persuade the Nobel literature committee to honour McCartney as they did Bob Dylan, and though he once wrote a song about the Queen, he won’t be the next poet laureate. Stripped of the music, the words on the page can look random or banal. But at best he’s a wonderfully versatile lyricist: troubadour, comedian, elegist, social commentator, pasticheur. And anyone with even half an interest in the Beatles will find The Lyrics fascinating.
it’s an impressive two-volume set chockfull of original lyric sheets, photos, and enough Macca, Beatles, and Wings ephemera to impress even the most diehard fan ... Paul the musical god appears to care very much what we think of him. While I suggest he’s too good for us and shouldn’t bother, I love his humanity and need for affirmation. It’s rarely possible to discern anyone’s true motive in this thing we call life, but if Paul McCartney’s goal with The Lyrics is to remind us of his unique talent, he’s succeeded admirably. Here’s to his next batch of sublimely silly love songs.
The odd curiosity aside...what emerges here is a portrait of a songwriter constantly searching for the elusive tune. A delightful, surprising treasure trove that no Beatles completist should miss.
