All great writers can often become mimics as they grapple with the works that intrigue and inspire them. “That Sir Paul McCartney turns out to be such a brilliant mimic shouldn't have come as a surprise,” he writes.
It turned out to be Paul McCartney on the phone mimicking Trump, rather too convincingly Muldoon adds. Muldoon, who has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, explains in the foreword that he was startled in 2016 to receive a call from Donald Trump, who immediately invited him to Washington to become his “Poetry Supremo.” The deep and life-changing friendship between McCartney and Lennon is often referenced, the way in which they played miraculously to each other's strengths and interests and brought the best out of each other, as well as oblique (and not so oblique) references Lennon's biting sarcasm and the sheer destructiveness of it, which McCartney saw as the defense mechanism of a young man who had much too rough an upbringing.īy contrast – and McCartney is keenly aware of it – his own family upbringing was fairly idyllic, with his Irish Catholic mother and Protestant father teaching him the lifelong values of tolerance and moderation, attributes that his friend John often struggled with. This is literally true because in 2008 NASA beamed one of their songs Across The Universe into deep space on the 40th anniversary of the day the band recorded it. How can you think of the 1960s without the pop band that was at its riotous center? Both of their time and yet timeless, The Beatles music will likely endure till the end of human history.
Titled "Paul McCartney The Lyrics, 1956 To The Present, Volume 1 and 2" (Liveright Publishing), the two-book set will make an ideal Christmas gift for both fans and general readers because Muldoon, 70, a fan and musician himself, understands just how intimately these songs are irreducibly entwined with the eras they were written in.
Lennon and McCartney variously remarked on it, but in Paul Muldoon's intimate and very moving two-volume collection of McCartney's lyrics and discussions of the events that inspired them we get perhaps our closest look ever at the secret life of a rock legend.