The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (International Edition)

If you’re into the Beatles or into just Paul McCartney, this is a great book to have in your Beatles library. He goes over the ideas for the songs and it’s really cool to read about some of the more obscure songs also. What can I say , he is Paul McCartney!

A Great Buy, if you're a serious Beatles & Macca fan and would like to learn how all that wonderful music came about.

Nice and heavy two sets of books - lovely pictures and fascinating back stories to songs I grew up with and love.

It’s one of the best gifts

When I heard Paul McCartney talking about this book on an interview, I knew I had to buy it for my husband, Eric, for his birthday. I went to Amazon Prime (the source of all things good and bookish) and ordered it. It arrived in plenty of time for his birthday, and he absolutely loves it. He has a two hour commute each day and loves listening to The Beatles Channel on Sirius XM, so I'm now looking for an audio version, so he can listen to it on that long drive.It's not cheap, but well worth the cost, and beautifully bound. This is a gift I know we will be able to hand down for many generations.Photo is of Eric with two of our sons, Matt and David.

Paul gives his personal backstory of each of his songs along with the full lyrics.

Great writing of how the dongs were createdGood memory

Bought this for my husband. He loves it. He's been a Beatles fan forever and is the type to read liner notes on album covers. He was very happy with this.

There was an initial surprise when we knew the title for these books: "The Lyrics". McCartney is a composer, a master in creating melodies, and one of the best there's been at that; but focusing in his lyrics seemed like an odd move. Then there's the "completeness" of it: the "the" in the title; the pompous subtitle "1956 to the present". The author's message was clear: this is about me not as a "mere" composer of pop ballads, but as something more serious: a "writer". It is also going to be something big, definite, major, over the top (McCartney tends to do that): this is the final book for all the many McCartney followers out there; look no more, this is it - almost 1,000 pages, it'll be all here. And then the books were published, so at long last we were able to buy the set. And how good is it?For starters the books set is big, and very, very heavy. Everything in it is grand: the format, the book case, the photos, the glossy pages. And then there're the lyrics and McCartney's elaboration on those, taking surprisingly little space (roughly a bit less than one fifth of all the pages). So the excessive format works, to these eyes, against the very core idea of "the lyrics": we expected personal comments on how Paul McCartney grew and developed into one of the most important and talented musicians of the XX century. Yet he has wrapped his thoughts, almost buried those, in hundreds of photographs and a grandiose set of two books, as if afraid of presenting his bare comments or that mere words wouldn't do it. We expected words about "The Lyrics", and instead we got a mammoth album of larger than life photographs with some texts here and there. And this does not work, because we get full-pages photos of cars (and dogs and guitars and places and people and houses and pieces of clothing) that gave name or merely inspired some of Paul's songs or are vaguely related to him at some point in his life - is that all necessary? The same can be said of the reproduction of hand-written lyrics. One or two of those look good and can complement well a book - dozens of pages of them (as there are in "The Lyrics") is, beyond a curiosity, an excess that eventually adds up nothing to the set of books - much on the contrary, in the end it gets boring and seems more a page-filler.Since the mid-2000s several musicians of McCartney's generation and stature have written their autobiographies: Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Elton John, to name just a few well-known names. These books are all very good, sober and very well written documents of the golden era of rock music, and Dylan's and Springsteen's memoirs are exceptionally well written. Each and every one of those memoirs is a joy to read and all of them became deserved best-sellers. Yet McCartney seems to have tried to outdo them all by going bigger, as if a conventional autobiography was below him or as he needed more space to tell his story.The inclusion of many Wings songs doesn't help either - there are more songs of McCartney with Wings and solo than with the Beatles, and this reduces the book's quality. It’s magnificent to read what took Paul to write ‘Yesterday’ or where he got the inspiration for "I Will", "Hey Jude" or "For No One". But, do we need to know what inspired him to compose minor songs post-1970, such as "Check my Machine", his instrumental, and rather poor, song of "McCartney II"? (And by the way, a song whose lyrics are a mere repetition of the song’s title). Does the inane and justly forgotten "Magneto and the Titanium Man" deserve six pages in the book - or in any book at all? And same can be said of his comments on the late Linda. Paul McCartney has always considered her as an important member of his own band, Wings, and she wasn't, at least in anything related to music. The late Mrs McCartney was, according to testimonies of all who knew her, a charming and lovely lady. Fair enough. But she was not a musician, even if she was keen to be photographed at keyboards (which she couldn't play). In "The Lyrics" McCartney refers often to her as a worthy musician, which she wasn’t, and he even writes that Linda was a "pioneer female singer" and that she was very good at "clapping and doing harmonies" - lines obviously written by the devoted husband, not by the musician. And these comments, and the inclusion of minor songs allegedly co-written by Linda ("Cook of the House") diminish considerably the quality of the book.In the end, we're left with just a handful of good texts and some original pictures, but only a few of each of those, and this does not seem to be enough to justify the cost or the expectation of the books-set. So after reading the books back-to-back we're indeed missing something we hoped to get: the story of the Beatles through their work. And this could be found in the best book ever written on the Beatles songs (lyrics and music) and of their evolution along the glorious sixties, as well in popular music. This book is still, by and large, "Revolution in the Head", by Ian MacDonald. This is an outstandingly well researched, unbiased and pitch-perfect analysis of the career of the band whose music is one of the peaks of contemporary art through a chronological analysis of each song the Beatles recorded. With "The Lyrics" we expected the same, but even better, because it’s written by one of the leaders and the main composer of the band from Liverpool. And we didn't get it. Far from it.What did we expect? Simple. If Paul would have only written something similar to MacDonalds' book: a musical journey through the songs, showing his initiations and shockingly fast development as a composer; if he would have only published, say, 300 pages thickly packed with insights, revelations and facts on his inspiration and brilliant musical career; if he would have supported the text with just a handful of well selected and never-seen pictures to illustrate specific parts of the tale; if the song's lyrics would have been presented chronologically, for the reader to see the composer's outstanding evolution; if McCartney wouldn't have tried so much to appear as "an author" by citing and almost comparing himself to giant contemporaries like Bertrand Russell or Harold Pinter; if Paul would have chosen for the book mostly Beatles songs, bookending those with a dozen pieces of his solo career, and relying heavily for these perhaps in his quite touching reflections on loss, friendship and growing old of the songs he composed for “Egypt Station" and "McCartney III". That would have been the wonderful, priceless, unique book we eagerly waited for months.But Paul McCartney hasn't lived up to the expectation created with the announcement of the publishing of “The Lyrics”. He is one of the best composers of the last 100 years, without a doubt. But, because he fell one by one for the mistakes above noted, the book neither works as a personal memoir nor as a review of 50 years of composing and success nor as an insight into the rock scene of the last six decades nor, in the end, as anything in particular. Unfortunately, this set of books ended up being something closer to a bloated artifact, a showy, repetitive and unnecessarily enormous photo album with elongated captions; it’s an odd, unbalanced and in the end rather disappointing way to share a brilliant composer’s inspiration with the world.

Me gustó que el producto llegó muy rápido y estaba bien protegido.

Nice books!

Partner loved it!

Best birthday present ever