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Paul McCartney: Yesterday, today and tomorrow

NEW YORK — Paul McCartney is 72, and only the wrinkles give his years away.

Paul McCartney. Photo: Reuters

Paul McCartney. Photo: Reuters

NEW YORK — Paul McCartney is 72, and only the wrinkles give his years away.

At his midtown Manhattan office suite, he seems as boyish and light-footed as he was on stage decades ago playing for a band called The Beatles. He’s so young in his thoughts that he will dismiss the idea of a memoir as a project for his 70s, catch himself, and dismiss a book again as if time were still a distant bother.

But he is here to promote the present, a score he completed for Destiny — a first-person shooter game for PlayStation and Xbox. The premise was intriguing partly because he isn’t very adept at video games and because the closing song he wrote, the ballad Hope For The Future, captures how he looks at the world.

“I thought, ‘Seeing it’s a shoot-em-up game, I will be the optimistic hope for the future’,” he said. “I will write something that sums up that side of the game.”

Writing songs on commission has been a pastime for McCartney since his years with The Beatles, when he composed the soundtrack for the 1966 film, The Family Way. He likes the challenge of fitting a piece of music into a pre-existing narrative, comparing it to solving a crossword puzzle, such as coming up with the theme song for the 1973 James Bond thriller, Live And Let Die.

“It’s like Live And Let Die, how the hell am I am going to write a song like that?” he said. “I can’t change the title. I can’t say I’m going to write a song, Live And Let Fish. Then you sit around and ... you work out a whole hypothesis.”

McCartney doesn’t think of himself as a personal writer in the tradition of his former collaborator, John Lennon. His songs are often less about his life than about assuming a mood or identity. So he is as comfortable declaring Hope For The Future as he was confiding that “I believe in yesterday”. He is as likely to imagine a lonely old woman called Eleanor Rigby as he is to put in a word for Silly Love Songs. At times, he takes on social causes or at least tries. Having written Blackbird for the civil-rights movement in the ’60s, he attempted a song about police killings in Ferguson and New York City.

“I was thinking recently about all these protests in New York and around the country. I thought it would be great to put something down about that, just to add my voice to those of the thousands of people walking in the streets,” he said. “I thought it through and it just didn’t come easily. I’m not giving up on it, but it didn’t come easily, whereas some other emotions may come easily to me.”

While forever a Beatle in the hearts of millions, he keeps his mind open to all moments. He sends tweets on occasion and texts his friends, although the fine points of Spotify are beyond him. Sam Smith is one of McCartney’s favourite young singers and the former Beatle recently attended a Jay-Z/Kanye West concert, found it “amazing” and praised their lyrics as “modern poetry”.

McCartney makes frequent visits to his native Liverpool, where he helped found The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts on the site of the school he and George Harrison attended as boys. And he keeps in close touch with family members and past associates, enjoying local gossip or joking with former Beatles producer George Martin. Loved ones speak to him from beyond: While working on a song — the melodies come to him constantly — he may summon the spirit of Lennon.

“I imagine myself back in a room with John, and I’ll think (about a lyric), ‘Ugh, that’s no good.’ And I’ll imagine him saying, ‘No, can’t do that.’ So I’m using him as a sort of judge of what I’m doing,” McCartney said.

History follows him everywhere, whether to a White House party where young friends of the Obamas gushed like the kids of old; or to a birthday party in Tokyo for his current wife, Nancy, where Queen and Beatles tribute bands provided entertainment.

“I had a kind of very emotional moment when we were sitting there — it could have been the alcohol,” he said. “And I’m thinking, ‘My God.’ (The tribute bands) were replicating the songs amazingly. They got all the orchestra parts on I Am The Walrus. They may not even speak the language that well, but they speak these songs beautifully.

“I should know that we’ve had that effect, because it’s historically true. But it doesn’t always come home to you in quite the way it did that night. I was welling up and (thinking), ‘I can’t well up to a Queen tribute band’.” AP

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