You say it’s your birthday

This, the occasion of your 55th, is a right moment to remind you that weeks before he turned 55, Sir Paul released Flaming Pie—the album I consider his masterpiece. You already knew those facts and that feeling of mine, I know—but we’ve made decades of reminding one another of everything, from the smallest trivial oddities to the most important truths. I’m so moved, so spun by Flaming Pie, because the Rightness of Reminding is its thematic nucleus. The album gorgeously raises up the latticework of mighty relational bonds through which its author’s mind and body stretch across the time spans of one lifelong creative friendship and one eternal romantic rapture. Gesturing in its clever title at once to both the myth of the name and the pith of the nosh, it sweetens these twin rich remembrances so that they rest easy in him and in us even as we take in the unbearable losses they detail.

Well, it’s my birthday too, yeah

You and I were together when Flaming Pie dropped into my life, in Amoeba SF. You’ve brought an enormous measure of magnificent music into my life, so I trusted your invitation that day that I dig in, that I uncover the evidence as you questioned my differential esteeming of John’s stunning and educative box sets, which are assuredly also Yoko’s, at the expense of my still-scant skewed misperceptions of Paul’s. Through your urging, I started learning with that first spin of Flaming Pie, that first unboxing even, the warmth and welcoming waiting in every Archive deluxe release. Luxurious reissue sets have always inspired my immersion, but silliness like stickers and patches and tour book replicas and oversized photobooks and Dark Side marbles mystified me, irritated me as I perceived their unnecessary bulking of prices. McCartney Archive sets teach me what these miscellany wish they were doing but never achieve like his do. “Let me into your life,” Paul sings on Egypt Station, his next-to-last album thus far, and through his differently-stunning, differently-educative box sets he reciprocally lets us, multidimensionally, into his life. Each set is unique, yet each is united in being curated with great care, from the big boxes to the multidisc sets, reminding us of each album as its own entity. It matters so much that the perfectionist precision of the Get Back taskmaster and the goofy clowning of the Bruce McMouse brainstormer and the photographic obsessiveness of the Eastman groom lives to look back and bring these sets to us now: Through all of their weird and wonderful elements, they are rich remembrances, each one, gleaming kaleidoscopes of aural and visual journaling, reflecting a moment. Each details one season in the artist’s life. In these respects, they take my breath away; I revel in them.

I’m glad it’s your birthday

You are used to me moving like this, from Paul-box-skeptic to Paul-box-odist. You have inspired many, many such moves throughout our lives together, because your aesthetic and intellectual intuitions correctly capture not just the art you engage but the people you embrace. Your gallery of gorgeous Jack posters helps open me to moving in a direction I so recently thought I never could, and every time I watch a Prince concert you are next to me no matter how geographically separate we might be because that direction, too, 35 years ago now, turned me to you and turned me more into me. I can chart several seasons of my life through your curious, confident compass. Only the latest of these is a radical pivot from my longtime turning tightly to John in the After to now turning timely to Paul in the After. John scrawls screeds, cuts compellingly, and in several seasons I needed John to scratch what, for me, itched. Paul opens graciously, spanning pastures so lush and broad and sweet and relaxing—yes, relaxing, even when they growl and groove—that they can turn even far too many people into one dear friend. Paul pulls peace from his pipes, and this is the time for me to take that in. Led by you, in this season of my life I inhale Paul and I feel fine.

 Happy Birthday to you

One way you and I remain oriented alike, despite your cross country consolidation and despite Amy’s protestation, is to complete collections anchored in the artist as a whole human. You and I never made much sense of gap-grizzled gathering of a mere few books by this author, of a random couple of albums by that band. You and I come together with one another because we come to the artist as a person striving to (re)make a world, and in that striving everything strikes us—you and I cross the Graffiti Bridge and stand in the Driving Rain because every drop of creativity counts. And of the many, many artists you and I approach this way, there’s none I’m more certain gets this than Sir Paul. Standing apart from sundry rockers’ tawdry trails of using their celebrity to womanize and spread seeds of selfishness, Paul dedicated himself, as you did, to tending tirelessly to hearth and family and children and flock. He audiences art, like you do, with the broadest ears and eyes. He offers home movies and Polaroids and handwritten lyrics aside his recorded works because he knows that for the most dedicated listeners, for you and I for certain, as we learn the art we learn the artist. Paul would recognize immediately, in us, decades of reminding one another of the most important truths. Characterizing, in an interview, the ethos of his next-to-first album in the After, Ram, he said, “Let’s just find ourselves.” Thanks for always helping me find myself, and here’s to plenty more years of looking and listening together.

We’re gonna have…