Appearing at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church | 1:20 pm – 2:10 pm
About the author
Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty years and served as Poetry Editor at The New Yorker from 2007 to 2017. He is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems 1968–2014; and Frolic and Detour. He served as the editor for the #1 New York Times bestselling collection of Paul McCartney’s lyrics, released in 2021. Muldoon now lives in New York.
MFOB featured book: The Lyrics by Paul McCartney, edited by Paul Muldoon
A work of unparalleled candor and splendorous beauty, The Lyrics celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of Paul McCartney through 154 of his most meaningful songs. From his early Liverpool days, through the historic decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his long solo career, The Lyrics pairs the definitive texts of 154 Paul McCartney songs with first-person commentaries on his life and music. Spanning two alphabetically arranged volumes, these commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them: his devoted parents, Mary and Jim; his songwriting partner, John Lennon; his “Golden Earth Girl,” Linda Eastman; his wife, Nancy McCartney; and even Queen Elizabeth, among many others. Here are the origins of Let It Be, Lovely Rita, Yesterday, and Mull of Kintyre, as well as McCartney’s literary influences, including Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, and Alan Durband, his high-school English teacher.
With images from McCartney’s personal archives—handwritten texts, paintings, and photographs, hundreds previously unseen—The Lyrics, spanning sixty-four years, becomes the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.
