How did the Beatles do it? Paul McCartney is finally telling us in new book

The basics of the Beatles story are a matter of public record – cynical John meets happy-go-lucky Paul, then George and, later, Ringo join a group that cranks out song after song for an all too brief period, then the world’s greatest hitmaking machine explodes in a welter of personal and business squabbles. And yet, as Adam Gopnik pointed out in a 2016 New Yorker article, “something mysterious remains, and that mysterious thing, as always in the lives of artists, is how they did what they did.”

Till now. With the publication of “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” a massive two-volume collection of every lyric Paul McCartney ever wrote during his Beatles days and after, at last we know where the songs (at least the ones he wrote or co-wrote) came from. Or let’s say we know as much as we ever will:

McCartney’s comments on each of these

154 songs that he wrote either himself or with a partner like

John Lennon or, later, Linda

McCartney are generous, but they’re also conversational, meaning they are intimate yet incomplete.

Reading “The Lyrics” is like standing in a master chef’s kitchen as he prepares a dish, adding a dash of this and a spoonful of that and talking to us so winningly that we don’t realize till later that he has withheld an ingredient, one that, because he was so deeply engaged himself, he didn’t know he was withholding.

But here is what he does tell us. First, he owes it all to Black artists. “When you get right down to it,” says McCartney, “in everything I’ve ever done – in the Beatles, Wings, solo – there’s an undercurrent of Black music. You could say it’s the blues, but it could be soul.” Even the White performers the early Beatles based themselves