As NME, reports, Paul McCartney‘s A Life in Lyrics podcast launched on October 4, 2023, with the first episode breaking down the creation of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.”
The podcast will have 12 episodes based on McCartney’s best-selling book. The show is hosted by the poet Paul Muldoon, who wrote the foreword to The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. It will give listeners the opportunity to sit in on conversations between McCartney and Muldoon.
Episode One sees Macca break down the Beatles track “Eleanor Rigby.” He explained where the title for the song came from, sharing that the name for the song came from a grave that he and his late bandmate John Lennon saw.
“There is a grave which John and I wandered around endlessly talking about our future,” he recalled in the podcast. “And there is a grave there [with the name Eleanor Rigby]. I don’t remember ever having seen that gravestone but it’s been suggested to me that psychologically I would have seen it”
He also shared where the famous lyric “Wearing a Face That She Keeps in a Jar by the Door” originated from, attributing the words to his mother and her love and use of Nivea cold cream.
“My mum’s favorite was Nivea and I love it to this day. It kind of scared me a little that women used quite so much cold cream, and it was my dread, when I got older and got married, that I would marry someone who would [wear a lot of cold cream] and put one of those big shower caps on and the curlers and have masses of things… So that played on my mind quite a bit, so she’s wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door,” he said.
