On his new podcast, A Life In Lyrics, Paul McCartney has explained how his mother influenced the lyrics on The Beatles track ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
Explaining the title of the track, McCartney told Irish poet Paul Muldoon: “There is a grave which John and I wandered around endlessly talking about our future. 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.”
“Wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door,” McCartney revealed how his mother’s Nivea inspired it. He explained: “My mum’s favourite was Nivea and I love it to this day. It kind of scared me a little that women used quite so much cold cream.”
McCartney continued: “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.”
What’s Paul McCartney, a Liverpudlian, doing writing about the Soviet Union in 1968? Turns out McCartney was 
doing a little Chuck Berry, a bit of The Beach Boys, some pastiche and a lot of subversion. Opening “The White Album”, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” raised some eyebrows. And because of The Beatles’ evolving position within the former Eastern Bloc the song has over the years taken on a life of its own, following the trajectory of the West’s often fraught relationship with the region.
“McCartney: A Life in Lyrics” is a co-production between iHeart Media, MPL and Pushkin Industries.
Link to Spotify podcast here or on Pushkin.fm here
The podcast will reveal the stories behind some of his best-known songs, from his work in the Beatles and Wings through his solo career, on a new podcast, McCartney: A Life in Lyrics. Each episode will find him focusing on a single song — including “Eleanor Rigby,” “Let It Be,” and “Live and Let Die,” among others in the first season — in discussion with poet Paul Muldoon, who wrote the foreword to McCartney’s bestselling book, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.
All 12 of the first season’s episodes will be available to stream at once with a Pushkin+ membership when it premieres on Sept. 20. Otherwise, fans can start listening to the first episode via iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, and other podcast platforms that day. A new episode will come out every week, as Rolling Stone report.
“I wanted a person who wrote songs and wanted to be someone whose life was in music,” McCartney says in a trailer for the podcast. In the clip, Muldoon explains how, over several years of picking apart McCartney’s words with McCartney himself, they realized that the book, The Lyrics, could double as an autobiography since some of the songs drew from themes that dated back to the songwriter’s childhood. “It was like going back to an old snapshot album, looking back on work I haven’t thought much about for quite a few years,”
On November 7, a one-volume edition of Paul McCartney's "THE Lyrics: 1956 to the Present" will be published in paperback, featuring additional commentaries.
