Paul McCartney‘s lyrics are being collected in a new book. The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present is due out on November 2, 2021. It was edited by Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who also wrote the introduction, and it comes as two volumes collected in a slipcase, spanning 960 pages. Along with lyrics from 154 songs he wrote, the book also features drafts, letters, and photos from McCartney’s personal archives. Watch a trailer below.

“More often than I can count, I’ve been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right,” McCartney says. “The one thing I’ve always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. 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 I’ve learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.”

“I hope that what I’ve written will show people something about my songs and my life which they haven’t seen before,” McCartney continues. “I’ve tried to say something about how the music happens and what it means to me and I hope what it may mean to others too.”

“Based on conversations I had with Paul McCartney over a five year period, these commentaries are as close to an autobiography as we may ever come” Muldoon says. “His insights into his own artistic process confirm a notion at which we had but guessed — that Paul McCartney is a major literary figure who draws upon, and extends, the long tradition of poetry in English”

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