“I Want to Hold Your Hand” is the Beatles' most extravagantly passionate vision of romance. You can bet Taylor understandsPaul McCartney just gave Taylor Swift the ultimate wedding gift. He sang one of the Beatles’ most beloved tunes, for the first time since 1964, the classic hit “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” According to reports in People, he serenaded Travis Kelce and Taylor with this love song at their wedding on July 3, at Madison Square Garden in New York. Busting out the Beatles’ first U.S. Number One for the first time in 62 years? What a mind. (Rolling Stone report)
The Beatles stopped playing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” live in their early days, and for some reason, Paul has never revived it before, on any of his solo tours. But for this occasion, it was the perfect song. It’s a love story — baby, just say yeah, yeah, yeah.
So far, the details about the wedding are still locked down tight, so we can only imagine what it sounded like. (Though you can feel confident that we’ll see it on film, sooner rather than later.) According to People’s chatty, NDA-defying source, “After the ceremony, Taylor’s mom Andrea invited everyone into the reception room where the stage was set up.” Stevie Nicks also performed — she and Macca are not just two of Swift’s biggest heroes, but two of her most outspoken fans. (No word yet about what Stevie sang, or whether Paul joined her for a “Leather and Lace” duet.)
For the Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was the song that broke them in America, after they were already massive everywhere else, in the first wave of U.S. Beatlemania. They played it on their famous debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, the night they invaded America — just a mile up the road from Madison Square Garden. (Paul and Taylor can both get obsessive about geek details like that.)
“I Want To Hold Your Hand” made the perfect introduction to the Beatles, because it’s their most extravagantly passionate vision of romance. It’s the most jubilant song they ever did, all raw emotion, four crazed boys howling and bashing away, because they need to tell this girl how they feel right now, or else they’ll explode. “I can’t hide!” they scream. “I can’t hide! I can’t hiiiiiiiiide!”
No wonder Taylor understands. She’s also never been any good at hiding her love away. Did she request this song? Or was it Paul’s pick? Either way, it’s fitting, because they’re both true romantics, maybe the deepest ones in pop music.
“The thing is, I’m quite a romantic,” Paul told me in 2021. “And I don’t just mean a boy-girl romance. The songs I fall in love with, they’re songs which ooze loving feelings, and there’s something very quieting, very calming about that. So I often find that’s a route I’m attracted to — just finding the love and putting it in a song.”
The Paul-Taylor connection runs deep. When she brought the Eras Tour to Wembley Stadium in London, Paul was right there in the pit, mixing it up in the crowd, with his wife Nancy Shevell and daughter Mary, just days after his 82nd birthday. He rocked out wearing his friendship bracelets. It was strangely moving to see footage of the fans circling around him, singing “But Daddy I Love Him” to McCartney, the eternally beloved rock dad.
Paul McCartney played ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ for the first time since 1964 at Taylor Swift’s weddingThe couple were married at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Friday (July 3), with the star-studded ceremony reportedly officiated by Adam Sandler.
While details around the ceremony have so far remained largely under wraps, it had been reported that both McCartney and Stevie Nicks performed at the event. Now, according to People, it has emerged that McCartney performed ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, in what is believed to be his first performance of the song since The Beatles played it in 1964.
People reported that after the wedding ceremony itself, Swift’s mother Andrea invited guests into the reception room, where the stage had already been set up, and McCartney and Nicks gave their performances
Swift and McCartney have long shared a public admiration for one another. Last month, she praised his latest album ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’ on Instagram, writing: “Never not inspired by this eternally exceptional artist.”
McCartney had previously said that Swift’s level of global fame reminded him of Beatlemania, though he joked that she did not need advice from him.
