Paul McCartney announces podcast with Irish poet Paul Muldoon

Music legend Paul McCartney will host a new podcast later this year, recounting the stories behind some of his best-known songs from The Beatles onward.

Each episode of the podcast will feature McCartney discussing a single song from his discography with poet Paul Muldoon. The lineup for the twelve-episode first season includes "Eleanor Rigby," "Let It Be," and "Live and Let Die," as well as a lineup of other classics. Season two is already planned and will release in February.

The podcast will premiere on September 20, at which time fans can listen to the first episode on most podcast platforms. A Pushkin+ subscription is required to listen to all the episodes at once, otherwise the episodes will release every Wednesday.

“We realised there was something very special happening in these conversations,” co-host Muldoon said in the podcast’s prologue. They quickly realised that the podcast could double as an autobiography of McCartney's life. “It was McCartney unfiltered.”

Paul Muldoon. Credit: John Minihan

The podcast will build off of McCartney's bestselling book, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, that was published in 2021.

Muldoon also wrote the foreword of the book, and the two will continue where the book left off.

“He was fabulous to work with," Paul Muldoon told Hot Press last August. "I’ve said this and I’ll say it again – it seems a bit fanciful, but when we got together for two or three hours at a time, we almost always reminded ourselves, ‘Okay, we’re not leaving here without something interesting’. One might be reminded that when himself and John Lennon got into a room, I don’t think they ever left a session without something to show for it.

“So in that sense it was quite business-like. Needless to say, he’s given a lot of interviews over the years, so some of the same stories recur. With that in mind, we tried to do it in almost a scholarly way – he is quite scholarly. One of the things he’s said, not only to me, was that had he not become a Beatle, he would probably have become an English teacher.”

Revisit our recent interview with the poet here.

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics is due the 20th of September. Read more about it here.