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There’s a moment about halfway through Paul McCartney’s current Got Back tour when things clearly get weird. He arrives during the performance of “Now and Then,” John Lennon’s unfinished 1970s demo, released in 2023 with the help of AI as “the final Beatles song.”
Watching the song’s polarizing music video, which uses digital trickery to reunite the surviving Beatles with their deceased bandmates and is projected on a giant screen behind McCartney and his band, is disturbing and difficult for the brain to comprehend.
But it’s just as hard to understand seeing an 83-year-old Beatle on stage in 2025. More than 60 years after the Fab Four first landed in America.
Smallest venue on the tour – biggest crowd
On Thursday night in Nashville, McCartney brought his 30-plus-song, Beatles-, Wings-and-more spectacle to the Pinnacle, the smallest venue on his 2025 North American tour. While not as intimate as New York’s tiny Bowery Ballroom, where Sir Paul played three pop-up shows in February, the 4,500-seat Pinnacle was still suitably cozy — making McCartney’s performance the hottest card in Nashville that week (not a small one performance, considering Sabrina Carpenter played two sold-out nights at the nearby Bridgestone Arena).
The lucky ones who made it in – from gray-haired Beatles fans with signs and at least two millennials with babies to former Mötley Crüe guitarist Mick Mars and jangle-pop hero Robyn Hitchcock – were the audience of a classic McCartney revue theater. He and his long-standing band, seven musicians in total, including the extraordinary Abe Laboriel Jr. on drums and a three-piece brass section, recreated Beatles classics such as “Got to Get You into My Life”, “Drive My Car”, “Getting Better” and “Lady Madonna” with great attention to detail.
On this tour they also get “Help!” back – the first time McCartney has played the song in its entirety since 1965. Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield called it the “emotional highlight” of the Got Back tour opener in Palm Springs in September.
Emotional peaks and fresh accents
In Nashville, “Help!” As the opener, his job was to rouse the crowd, but the emotional climax came not with a McCartney song, but with George Harrison’s “Something”. Starting with McCartney solo on ukulele, it was a beautiful, understated performance that kept the audience silent until the band came in for the euphoric finale.
McCartney’s willingness to perform Beatles material he didn’t originally sing – Harrison’s “Something,” Lennon’s “Help!” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” — has kept his setlists from becoming tiresome, even as he delivers nightly workhorses like “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude.” For the sake of completeness: Both piano ballads were particularly rousing on Thursday evening.
Wings Power: The seventies shine
But even with all those Beatles numbers, including a wonderfully punchy “Get Back,” it was the Wings songs that made this tour stop stand out. Perhaps it was because a new eponymous collection, Wings, was just hours away from release, but McCartney and band clearly seemed to enjoy playing the songs from his ’70s era.
“Jet” was supersonic, “Let Me Roll It” was remarkably funky, and “Live and Let Die” burned wildly. Even if the pyro in the Pinnacle was replaced by simulated fire images.
Unfortunately, “Junior’s Farm,” which Wings recorded in Nashville, didn’t make the setlist, and McCartney didn’t follow Ringo’s lead in January, speaking at length about his time in Music City and its influence on him and the Beatles.
He still had fun, reading aloud signs held up in the audience – including one that read “I’m gay; help me come out.” “Say ‘I’m gay’ three times,” McCartney advised. He also introduced “Blackbird” with an inspiring story: how the Beatles threatened to cancel a segregated concert in Jacksonville, Florida, if the promoter wouldn’t let black fans sit with white people. (The organizer relented.)
Flags, suite, catharsis
After a brief exit from the stage following the obligatory “Hey Jude” sing-along chorus, McCartney and his band returned to perform a mini-Abbey Road suite. Previously they waved flags: the USA, the Union Jack, the Tennessee state flag and a Pride flag. It was a staged image, but one that resonated with fans who gratefully embrace any hint of unity in a country that feels so divided.
Maybe the music of the Beatles offered that one night. Or at least an octogenarian who doesn’t shy away from giving the advice that gave this great evening one of its sweetest moments – the unifying one: “In the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.”
Setlist
- “Help!”
- “Coming Up”
- “Got to Get You Into My Life”
- “Drive My Car”
- “Letting Go”
- “Come On to Me”
- “Let Me Roll It”
- “Getting Better”
- “Let ‘Em In”
- “My Valentine”
- “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five”
- “Maybe I’m Amazed”
- “I’ve Just Seen a Face”
- “In Spite of All the Danger”
- “Love Me Do”
- “Every Night”
- “Blackbird”
- “Now and Then”
- “Lady Madonna”
- “Jet”
- “Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite!”
- “Something”
- “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
- “Band on the Run”
- “Get Back”
- “Let it be”
- “Live and Let Die”
- “Hey Jew.”
- “I’ve Got a Feeling”
- “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”
- “Helter Skelter”
- “Golden Slumbers”
- “Carry That Weight”
- “The end”