Paul McCartney’s official Facebook page recently announced special details about the Beatles rocker’s newest project, sharing he’s collaborating once again with Irish poet Paul Muldoon for a podcast.
The duo sat down in 2021 and created ‘The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,’ where they talked about the 154 songs McCartney wrote as a member of The Beatles, as the Wings frontman, and during his solo career.
However, their new collaboration, ‘A Life In Lyrics,’ is expected to tell the bassist’s songwriting journey, including the memories, people, interactions, and so on.
In the prologue episode, Muldoon even explained how the podcast came to be and emphasized the show was going to be ‘unfiltered:’
“When we listened back to the tapes, we realized there was something very special happening in these conversations. It was McCartney unfiltered.”
The first season of ‘A Life In Lyrics’ consists of 12 episodes and will be released on September 20, 2023. On platforms ( iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify) other than Pushkin+, episodes will be available weekly, whereas Pushkin+ will release the whole season at once.
iHeartMedia Digital Group CEO Conal Byrne explained how important it is for a former Beatle to firsthandedly give insight about the writing process of his songs:
“Paul McCartney is one of the most groundbreaking, gifted artists of all time, and his songs have elevated and given meaning to so many moments in so many of our lives — so the chance to launch a podcast that tells the stories behind those songs … it’s a once-in-a-lifetime project. ‘McCartney: A Life In Lyrics’ will be a first-hand, first-of-its-kind account of his creative process — that has shaped and inspired multiple generations across the globe.”
After ‘The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present’ was published, McCartney explained in a previous interview that it was expected of him for a long time to write an autobiography, and he had always been efficient in songwriting; therefore it makes sense for him to combine the two:
“More often than I can count, I’ve been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right. The one thing I’ve always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I’ve learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.”
In the same interview, Pulitzer-winner poet Paul Muldoon described the process of working with Paul, and what he thinks of him with the following words:
“Based on conversations I had with Paul McCartney over a five-year period, these commentaries are as close to an autobiography as we may ever come. His insights into his own artistic process confirm a notion at which we had but guessed — that Paul McCartney is a major literary figure who draws upon, and extends, the long tradition of poetry in English.”
You can listen to the prologue episode below.
