“He looks long and hard into every aspect of life and I believe readers, old and new, will be struck by a book that will show that side of him. We were determined never to leave the room without something interesting,” said Muldoon.

“In a strange way, our process mimicked the afternoon sessions he had with John Lennon when they wrote for the Beatles. Muldoon, the Pulitzer prize-winning Northern Irish poet, previously told the Guardian that the book was based on a series of meetings he had had with McCartney over five years, during which they discussed the background to his songs “in a very intensive way”. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I’ve learned serve much the same purpose. I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. “The one thing I’ve always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. “More often than I can count, I’ve been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right,” writes McCartney in a foreword to the book. Each song – from All My Loving to Yellow Submarine – will come with commentary from McCartney about its creation. The book will be released on 2 November and will also include “many further treasures” from McCartney’s archives, said Allen Lane, from handwritten lyric sheets, to previously unseen personal photographs, drafts and drawings. The handwritten and never-before-seen lyrics were found in one of McCartney’s notebooks – believed to date back to the early 1960s – while preparing the book. Publisher Allen Lane said the book would also feature the lyrics to the unrecorded song Tell Me Who He Is.

The beatles tell me why lyrics