McCARTNEY TELLS HIS LIFE IN THE LYRICS

Paul McCartney has always saved his writing for lyrics, believing his story had been told “so many times” he never needed to dabble in a memoir. But now the former Beatle, 78, has written “as close to an autobiography as we may ever come,” his publisher says, after enlisting the help of a prize-winning poet and pop fan. McCartney, shown, has assembled 154 songs spanning his life from boyhood to The Beatles and beyond into The Lyrics, a 900-page volume with each text providing a frame for biographical detail about the time it was written. McCartney, whose book comes in November, said: “I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.”