Paul McCartney Offers an Intimate Valentine’s Day Gift

Paul McCartney during a Valentine’s Day concert at Irving Plaza

A holiday, a song title and a free night before a TV appearance were pretext enough for Paul McCartney to book a sudden show on Saturday night at Irving Plaza; its capacity, about 1,000, is an order of magnitude smaller than the arenas he usually headlines. The audience, he said joshingly, was “so close you can see my dental work.” On Sunday, Mr. McCartney was scheduled to perform on “Saturday Night Live’s” 40th-anniversary prime-time special. But Saturday was also Valentine’s Day, and Mr. McCartney announced, “Tonight it’s all about love.”

Midway through the set, he came to “the point of this evening.” He dedicated “My Valentine,” a minor-key ballad from his 2012 album “Kisses on the Bottom,” to his wife, Nancy Shevell, and red confetti petals showered down on the sold-out crowd. “That’s the big spectacular production number of this evening,” he said afterward.

The concert, about 100 minutes long, was mostly an abridged version of the set Mr. McCartney performed last year on his world tour of arenas. He slipped in a few 1950s oldies he clearly admires: the Crickets’ “It’s So Easy” and, even better, Carl Perkins’s “Matchbox,” which gave him a chance to belt the blues and show off some pointed, rockabilly-rooted lead guitar.


Although Kanye West, Mr. McCartney’s recent collaborator, is also performing on the “Saturday Night Live” special, he didn’t share the stage with Mr. McCartney as he did at the Grammy Awards. It might have been jarring; this audience was not a hip-hop crowd, and it sang along loudest on Beatles songs from the 1960s. The Irving Plaza show was Mr. McCartney’s domain. He drew on every decade of his long career — including a few recent songs, like “Save Us” and “New” from his 2013 album “New” — and he casually moved from instrument to instrument, though he never got around to the drums.

The set was filled — as is Mr. McCartney’s huge songwriting catalog — with love songs that fuse musical ingenuity with pure, guileless romance: “I know this love of mine will never die/And I love her.” By now, Mr. McCartney’s graceful melodies are a shared cultural heritage. Among his gifts, as songwriter and singer, is the ability to make songs like “And I Love Her” come across — even in their umpteenth performance — as sweetly sincere yet never saccharine.

Mr. McCartney’s cleverness shows up in songs like “Another Day,” which shifts between rocker and waltz; he followed it with “We Can Work It Out,” which does the same trick. Unlike most ballad auteurs, Mr. McCartney is also a rocker, schooled on rockabilly and Little Richard, ready to rasp whether it was in “Matchbox,” in the Beatles’ brilliant Beach Boys parody “Back in the U.S.S.R.” or over the gnarled guitar riff of his “Let Me Roll It,” which segued into an instrumental of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady.”

In the club, Mr. McCartney and his band weren’t intent on being as polished as they might be in a studio or stadium. They let Abe Laboriel Jr.’s drum flourishes erupt; they plowed ahead when Mr. McCartney’s voice grew ragged in “Jet.” The songs, so familiar but still eagerly awaited, lived up to decades of memories; there was no question about everyone joining in on “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” or “Hey Jude.” The encore, the grand finale of “Abbey Road,” summed up much of Mr. McCartney’s songwriting in its quick-changing suite: ballad, rocker, anthem, benediction. “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make,” he declared. It was, after all, Valentine’s Day.

Cr. New York Times