Paul McCartney

English musician, singer, and songwriter (b. 1942); co-founder of the Beatles and, with John Lennon, author of the Lennon–McCartney songbook. After the band’s break-up he led Wings through the 1970s and has sustained one of the longest solo careers in popular music.

McCartney is conventionally cast as the melodic, accessible pole of the partnership — the writer of ‘Yesterday’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Let It Be’ — against John Lennon‘s rawer, more confessional register. The journalist Ian Leslie argues the tidy division does both men a disservice: McCartney’s experimental instincts (tape loops, the Sgt. Pepper structure, the ambition of the Abbey Road medley) were often the more radical, and much of what is filed under one name was in truth written across the pair.

In the wiki

• Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time — Ian Leslie, author of John and Paul - A Love Story in Songs, reframes McCartney not as the safe one but as the driving creative organiser of the later Beatles, and reads his lifelong reticence about the relationship as grief rather than indifference. Leslie draws on McCartney’s own late-life admissions — that he still dreams of Lennon — to argue the partnership was, for both men, the defining intimacy of their lives, and that McCartney’s melodic gift and Lennon’s edge were each sharpened by the other’s presence.

See also

• John Lennon — his songwriting partner and the other subject of the episode
• Ian Leslie — the author who discussed the partnership with Tyler Cowen
• John and Paul - A Love Story in Songs — Leslie’s book on the relationship