Paul McCartney says he struggles to follow Bob Dylan’s live rearrangements, even as he insists he would never stop playing his biggest hits.
Paul McCartney admits he still can’t quite get his head around Bob Dylan’s approach to live performances, where even well-known songs can sound unrecognisable and leave audiences playing catch-up in real time.
Dylan is currently on tour and is scheduled to continue through the summer, but whether McCartney will make it to a show remains unclear. Still, the former Beatle has already offered a candid glimpse into how he thinks about setlists, obligations and what it means to read the room.
When asked in an interview with The Rest is Entertainment whether there are songs he feels he has to play in concert that he might not like. McCartney pushed back on the idea of distancing himself from the material people come to hear.. “If you’re going out to do a show. I know who’s in my audience most of the time. ” he said.. “It’s kind of families.. So it can be granddads [around] my age. or it can be their kids. and then it could be their kids.. So, it’s quite a spread.. So, I think, Well, we could do songs they don’t know.. I have a lot of black holes.. But they’ve paid a lot of money.”
He also described why he keeps his approach relatively anchored to the songs that define him, even when they may feel overfamiliar. McCartney’s instinct, he said, is to avoid alienating a crowd that spans generations and has come for the biggest moments.
From there, he turned to the way Dylan performs.. McCartney said he had attended a “couple of shows” and struggled to identify what track Dylan was actually playing.. “I’ve been to see a couple of shows of Bob’s. and I couldn’t tell what the song was [that] he was doing. ” McCartney claimed.. “Now that’s a bit much, because I know his stuff.. I get it if he doesn’t want to do ‘Mr.. Tambourine Man.’ Maybe he’s fed up with that, but I would like to hear it.. And I’ve paid.”
Dylan is known for altering the arrangements of his classics, and even when he reaches for major hits, they rarely land the way they did on the original recordings. For McCartney, that makes the experience less like recognition and more like guesswork.
The two artists, he noted, present very different kinds of concerts.. When you see McCartney, he performs songs drawn from his work with the Fab Four, Wings and his solo career.. Dylan’s sets. by contrast. often lean toward lesser-known material. and even at his biggest. the sound can be reshaped enough that it becomes difficult to follow along.
McCartney’s comments underline a central tension in how legacy acts build their live shows: whether a performer should preserve the songs as fans expect them, or keep transforming them into something else entirely.
Paul McCartney Bob Dylan touring live concerts setlists The Rest is Entertainment