A Hymn to Yesterday

As he drains his tea and finishes his bagel, it is Linda who comes up repeatedly, as inspiration for "Ecce's" most upbeat passages along with its darkest ones. "Life has to go on," he says. "I am basically an optimist and she was very much an optimist."

Asked why he didn't dedicate the work to Linda, he smiles.

"It actually would have been very awkward with a new wife to say, 'This is for Linda,' just pragmatically," he says. "But it was started with Linda and, had she lived, I'm sure it would have been dedicated to her."

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"Ecce Cor Meum," which has its U.S. premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York next Tuesday, is an hour-long composition, a beautiful piece filled with sumptuous arrangements and harmonies, that reads and sounds like a retrospective of a life. But McCartney, who is working on a new studio album, talking about touring next year and mulling a classical guitar concerto, makes clear his is a life still in progress.

"It's 'Behold My Heart' -- so far," he says.

Its central themes are peace and love, the same simple (his critics say simplistic and annoying) mantras he has been pushing since the Beatles formed in the late 1950s. When the choir sings, "Peace and love are always our true nature / love is all," it's easy to hear the echoes from records with deep grooves worn in the vinyl: "All you need is love, love / love is all you need."

"I'm not very good at hate songs," says the man whose love-laden pop songs have topped the U.S. charts 29 times. "It doesn't come naturally to me. No matter how angry I might be, I seem to still write a love song. And that's the joy of what I do."

He is asked about this passage: "Life aboard this fast revolver still remains a magic mystery / Loud reports of anger fill the pages of our history." The Beatles references seem obvious in "Revolver" and "Magical Mystery Tour," and maybe those angry reports were of the gunshots that took John Lennon?

McCartney stands and steps over to a lamp to have a better look at the tiny print of the lyrics in the CD jacket. He says the words may be relevant to his own life, but more importantly, they are universal. He reads aloud and annotates: "Life aboard this fast revolver . . . the revolver is the Earth. Still remains a magic mystery . . . life on Earth is quite a mystery. Loud reports of anger fill the pages of our history . . . there's been war and suffering."

He then reads the last two lines of the stanza, and he's back, inevitably, to love: "Those of us with love can now embrace / With sweet relief a life lived at a gentler pace."