Happy Birthday Paul

Paul McCartney turns 75 today.

His effect on my life has been profound. Even if I should leave this earth with nothing but a few friends having read my modest attempts at artistic creativity, I will have died fulfilled. If there is but one singular feeling I share with him and any other successful artist, even if I shall never rise to their level of talent it is this quote from him (shared from "TheWriter's Almanac");

“Every time I come to write a song,” says McCartney, “there’s this magic little thing where I go, ‘Ooh, ooh, it’s happening again.’ I just sit down at the piano and go, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know this one,’ and suddenly there’s a song.”

Similarly, I watched an interview with Greg Allman, where he said writing "Midnight Rider" came as a complete song and not from him...from something deep inside existing in him but apart.

McCartney woke up one day with "Yesterday" completely formed in his mind and struggled for months wondering where it came from, playing the song incessantly to anyone and everyone, on piano, on guitar, to the point where others thought him obnoxious...he was that sure he had stolen it from somewhere else,

When I do most of my writing I have this experience. Something other than me takes over.

This is true of almost every poem and every short story I write.

I look at my contest winning poem, "The West Shore" and honestly have no clue how I wrote it. I just sat at the keyboard and let it leave my head and go right to the keys. The verses were not thought, the words were not managed. The feelings were not explored...it just happened, and I look upon that poem now and it scares me a bit because I honestly do not know from where it came...yet I do. I was there and I tapped out those words.

And I see Paul's work as a young man, before he dissected and lived through years and years of his magic...and because it wasn't deeply considered by him and it was amongst the magic of three other young men experiencing the same creative storm, listening to "Penny Lane" and the instrumentals of the creation of "Sgt. Pepper's", and the deep inner soul searching of "Mother Nature's Son", and the genius arrangement of "Hey Jude", one can truly see this magic at play...that same mystery that God has granted me in my own extremely small measure, and in God's true grace, allowed me to uncover at an age when most artists look back rather than forward, after covering it up for my entire life.

And so Paul turns seventy-five-years old, and those of us who were on this earth when his creativity was at its peak, witnessing the miracle first-hand with so many others as he shared it for the first time, have a bond that those born later will never know.

My first words to the Lord, if I am granted entry to heaven will be thankfulness for having been allowed to exist at the same time as one of the greatest artistic souls ever to walk on Earth. 

Happy Birthday Paul McCartney