A Hymn to Yesterday

In here, though, he's sipping hot tea and wolfing down three bagel halves after hours of rehearsals. Settled in a deep leather chair in room in the church's basement, he looks far younger and thinner than in his photos, and sharp in a navy blue pinstriped suit with a playful fireball-red silk lining. He's upbeat and relaxed, knees splayed, little dabs of cream cheese on the fingertips that wrote "Hey Jude."

As he talks, he keeps breaking into song. When he makes a point about songwriting, he sings a few bars of "Eleanor Rigby." That seems normal enough, until it sinks in that the man who sang "Eleanor Rigby" is sitting there singing "Eleanor Rigby." He says the lyrics and the music to most of his compositions came at the same time; he mentions "Let It Be," "She's Leaving Home," "Fool on the Hill." One notable exception is "Yesterday," which started as a tune. The first words he fitted to one of the world's most recognized melodies, just to block out the spacing, were, he says, singing with campy sincerity, "Scrambled eggs, oh my baby I love your legs."

"It was good, but I had to change it," he says, laughing.

He's jolly, thinking about music. His mind is filled with "Ecce Cor Meum."

And a woman different from the one in all the trashy headlines.

"Linda very much pervades the whole piece," he says of the American he married in 1969 and with whom he raised four children.

When McCartney was asked to write a choral piece to inaugurate a concert hall at Oxford University's Magdalen College, he and Linda went to see the place together in 1996. They were together when he agreed to take on the project, which he says he took as a chance to try something new.

"When I was in the middle of it, she passed away, and we went through all the anguish, which stopped me," he says. "And then when I was able to pick it up, I picked it up by writing some of the very sad things in it." Near "Ecce's" opening, the sopranos soar: "Take love away and we are ruined / In a world without each other / How could we go on living our lives?"

"I remember sitting at a keyboard and just weeping as I wrote this piece," he says about the woman who was his partner for three decades, for whom he wrote "My Love" and "Maybe I'm Amazed."

He talks around his breakup with Heather without mentioning her name, adding little to his few public statements that he is "sad," that he believes keeping details of the divorce private is the most dignified course, the best way to protect Beatrice, their 3-year-old daughter.

Being recognized in every corner of the planet is "slightly sort of spooky," he says, but "90 percent of the time" he enjoys it. He likes the people who recognize him on the street and say (he affects a flat American accent), "Hey, Paul! Let it be, dude!" The downside is the relentless red-meat coverage of his divorce -- the tabloids may adore Macca, but they love scandals even more.

"In the time I'm going through now, with a divorce, I know that everything that happens will be widely reported -- and actually everything that doesn't happen will be widely reported, even more," he says. He allows that he chose this life, and "it's something with great advantages. When I have these sort of drawbacks, I think, 'You know what, compared to some people's lives, you've got it pretty good.' "