The Sunday Times bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Year now in paperbackPaul McCartney says this is as close as he will get to an autobiography and no wonder his life is in every line of these songs ... pure joy Sunday Times Book of the Year With seven songs added for this edition Bluebird Day Tripper English Tea Every Night Hello Goodbye Magical Mystery Tour and Step Inside LoveSpanning seven decades from his early Liverpool days through the historic decade of The Beatles to Wings and his long solo career Paul McCartneys The Lyrics has transformed the way artists write about music pairing the definitive texts of 161 songs with intimate autobiographical commentaries on McCartneys life and music.Arranged alphabetically these commentaries reveal the diverse circumstances in which the songs were written how they ultimately came to be and the remarkable often ordinary people and places that inspired them. Dozens of vignettes recreate the workingclass Liverpool of McCartneys 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 fte 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. Thus began a second act of now more than fifty years with Linda and family life as driving forces inspiring songs from Maybe Im Amazed written just after the breakup of The Beatles to the 2012 ballad My Valentine addre