Dear Sir or Madam:

Though it took nearly six decades to transpire, Paul McCartney is a paperback writer with the arrival of the expanded – and consolidated – release of 2021’s The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present in paperback format.

And a book like this – which is ideal for picking up and thumbing through – works better in this style rather than the clunky, two-volume coffee table variety that preceded it. Sure, the photos are smaller and their quality is diminished, but these “Lyrics” are portable and easily taken to the beach, the bedroom or the bathroom – anytime and place where reading without deep concentration necessary is desired.

While the music is at least as important to McCartney’s fans as are his words; McCartney himself seems to place more value on the lyrics and the infinite possibilities every blank page represents.

“Musicians get only 12 notes to work with and in a song, you often use only about half of them,” he says. “But with words, the options are limitless.”

With the addition of seven numbers – including “Day Tripper,” “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Bluebird” – this new edition raises to 161 the number of songs whose lyrics and stories are presented over nearly 600 pages. McCartney discusses the songs’ inspiration and the process of composing them with co-writer Paul Muldoon, who puts McCartney’s thoughts into story form and penned an introduction for this reissue.

The Lyrics stands as the autobiography McCartney will never write. For while the former Fab never kept diaries, “What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I’ve learned serve much the same purpose,” McCartney writes in the Forward.

“And these songs span my entire life.”

Which leads to the one big issue with The Lyrics. Rather than chronicling McCartney’s artistry by presenting the songs in chronological order – thereby allowing readers to easily see and assess his evolution from young Liverpudlian to elder statesman of the world – the songs appear alphabetically; from “All My Loving to “Your Mother Should Know,” when 1956’s “I Lost My Little Girl” through to McCartney III’s “Women and Wives” would’ve been vastly more illustrative of the composer’s long and winding road.