Review: Paul McCartney still stirs crowds after 6 decades of performing
A few weeks shy of his 77th birthday, Paul McCartney has nothing left to prove to anyone. He’s been in the public eye for more than five decades and is obviously accustomed to adulation.
Monday night at a packed-to-the-rafters PNC Arena, he was even cheered for taking off his coat at one point.
“That was the big wardrobe change of the whole evening,” he said.
But it is to McCartney’s credit that he still works hard to earn that adulation. He puts a surpassing amount of effort into songs he’s sung 1,000 times, and none of Monday night’s show felt the least bit rote.
McCartney’s first Raleigh performance since 2002 clocked in at just under three hours, with 38 songs spanning his career before, during and after the Beatles (even including the first tune he ever recorded, “In Spite of All the Danger” by the pre-Beatles group The Quarrymen). And yet some of his best-known songs weren’t even in the set list – “Yesterday,” “Hello, Goodbye” and “Penny Lane” among them.
For most acts, an enduring landmark like “Let It Be” would be the obvious closing number. But McCartney has written at least a dozen other songs just as iconic as that one, so he dropped “Let It Be” in eight songs from the end – it wasn’t even the pre-encore closer.
Source: wral.com
