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Artist News
Previously unseen Beatles lyrics to appear in new Paul McCartney book
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 24 August 2021
Paul McCartney is publishing a book of his lyrics in November which kind of doubles up as something a bit like a memoir. The book, simply called ‘The Lyrics’, will feature 154 of his songs, each accompanied by some commentary from the man himself. There will also be a bunch of photographs and drawings.
The featured songs will come from across McCartney’s career, and will include the lyrics of an unrecorded Beatles song called ‘Tell Me Who He Is’, which McCartney seemingly found in an notebook from the early 1960s while working on this project.
Alongside the book’s launch, the British Library in London will host a free exhibition called ‘Paul McCartney: The Lyrics’ which will, and I quote, “celebrate the songwriter and performer and feature previously unseen lyrics from his personal archive”.
McCartney himself introduces the book as follows: “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”, he adds, “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”.
