'The Lyrics': Paul McCartney reveals crush on queen, how John Lennon 'gleefully' quit Beatles

Paul McCartney’s new book “The Lyrics” is less about his songs than his life.

The two-volume, handsomely boxed set (Norton, 960 pp., on sale Tuesday) is drawn from 50 hours of conversation recorded over five years with poet Paul Muldoon, who shapes the transcripts into a loose song-by-song narrative that’s more enchanting than revealing. Careening from decade to decade, and invoking John Lennon on the regular, it is likely the closest thing to a memoir McCartney will ever publish, with lyric sheets and a hefty number of unseen personal photos of his family and The Beatles.

There’s nothing here even a casual admirer hasn’t heard about the writing of “Yesterday” or “Let It Be,” and the 154 songs he’s chosen to dissect will be hotly debated. (Wings throwaway “Cook of the House” rather than beloved B-side “Daytime Nighttime Suffering”? Four songs from the 2018 album “Egypt Station”?) But fans will thrill to the autobiographical nuggets sprinkled along the way (he gently acknowledges keyboards weren't Linda McCartney's strength), as well as the surprising names who pop up (Jane Asher, a talking point he’s mostly steered clear of since 1968 when they ended their engagement).

Among the book’s best stories:

After John Lennon quit The Beatles, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr joked about carrying on as ‘The Threetles’

McCartney made headlines with his recent BBC Radio 4 interview, which resurfaced the revelation that Lennon quit the band before he did. More stunning for fans will be McCartney's wounded description of Lennon giddily announcing his decision, a moment McCartney revisits a couple of times in “The Lyrics.”

“Towards the end of 1969, John had quite gleefully told us it was over,” McCartney says recalling “Dear Friend,” a track from his 1971 “Wild Life” album that addressed the demise of their friendship. “I can remember him saying, ‘Oh, this is quite exciting.’ … All of us could see what he meant, (but) it was not quite so exciting for those left on the other side.” Still, “we didn’t seriously consider” moving forward as a trio.

The business of being Beatles ended unpleasantly (“I sued my friends from Liverpool, my lifetime friends, in court”), though the relationships would heal.

“I was very glad of how we got along in those last few years, that I had some really good times with (John) before he was murdered,” says McCartney, who remembers their last meeting as very friendly: “We talked about how to bake bread.”

Paul McCartney says he 'didn't instigate' The Beatles' breakup: John Lennon did

McCartney did odd jobs for the real ‘Eleanor Rigby’ when he was a Scout

Fans have long obsessed about a woman named Eleanor Rigby who is buried in a church graveyard outside Liverpool as the likely inspiration for the song, but McCartney singles out another source.

“Growing up, I knew a lot of old ladies – partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling,” he says. McCartney got along well with one elderly woman in particular and often popped into her kitchen for a visit. “Just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write.”

In his boyhood, McCartney fancied ‘Her Majesty’ the Queen: ‘She was quite a babe’

“She was a good-looking woman, like a Hollywood film star,” McCartney recalls of Queen Elizabeth II, 95, who inspired the 25-second song fragment “Her Majesty,” part of the epic medley that closes 1969’s “Abbey Road.”

"I think part of the secret behind her popularity, at least for my generation, was that she was quite a babe. ... In our boyish ways, we rather fancied her."

He shares that he did once perform the song for the monarch: “I don’t know how to break this to you, but she didn’t have a lot to say.”

'Abbey Road':  All the album's songs, ranked

‘Eight Days a Week’ exists because McCartney lost his driver’s license for speeding

“I was banned from driving for a year” after getting caught one too many times, he says.

One chauffeur hired to shuttle McCartney to Lennon’s house for a songwriting session lamented his long hours on the job: “Oh, I’ve been working eight days a week.”

“I ran into John’s house saying, ‘Got the title,’ " McCartney says.

Ringo Starr took a bathroom break while The Beatles recorded ‘Hey Jude’

As the tape rolled on the seven-minute track, “I felt him tiptoe back in behind me,” says McCartney, and the drummer managed to “hit his intro without missing a beat. So even as we’re recording it, I’m thinking, ‘This is the take.’ "

Lennon famously insisted that McCartney retain the temporary lyric, “The movement you need is on your shoulder,” and the two are inextricably linked in Paul’s mind. “He was so firm about keeping it in that when I sing ‘Hey Jude’ now, I often think of John, and it becomes this emotional point in the song for me.”

'A blues cover band': Paul McCartney disses The Rolling Stones

He gave Badfinger a blueprint for ‘Come and Get It’ and convinced them to reproduce it faithfully

The Beatles wrote with intention, and McCartney discusses how he and Lennon would block out a week to churn out an album’s worth of material. (“Let’s write a swimming pool,” they’d joke as they sat down to write a money-making hit.) So he knew the goal when he wrote a single for Badfinger in 1969.

“ ‘This is how you must do it,’ " he told Badfinger when he handed over his demo for “Come and Get It.”  “And they said, 'Well, we’ll put our spin on it.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want you to. I want you to do it faithfully because this is the hit formula.' "

The band balked, but their soundalike version became a big success. “Basically, I was saying, ‘This is a finished painting, and if you just do a reproduction, it’ll be yours and I won’t bring mine out. You will have painted it.' ”

'Let It Be':  Why the Beatles' last album is a 'mess,' but still spawned a masterpiece

‘Waterfalls’ is one of his favorites, but he doesn’t think the recording has aged well

He wrote the 1980 single while still with Wings but left it off the band’s final album because “I wasn’t happy with the lyrics.” Recording it on the fly for his experimental “McCartney II” album meant “Waterfalls” “didn’t get the arrangement that perhaps it deserved. In the early days of synthesizers, you got fooled into thinking the synth strings always sounded good, which they didn’t.”

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Paul McCartney's 'Lyrics' book reveals how John Lennon quit Beatles