Paul McCartney is another year older and wiser, with the musical legend celebrating his 82nd birthday Tuesday (June 18).
To commemorate the occasion, the Beatles star shared a photo of himself onstage via Instagram. “They say it is my birthday,” he captioned the snap. “I’m looking forward to being spoilt rotten by my loved ones! – Paul”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(734x459:736x461)/paul-mccartney-stella-mccartney-show-081122-a83a324d9d194f9c83f1c717941ca602.jpg)
The night prior to McCartney’s big day, Austin Butler revealed that he’d recently attended a party — which may have been the former’s birthday bash — at the Wings frontman’s house. The gathering was also attended by Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Meryl Streep and Taylor Swift, who at one point DJ’d the festivities, according to the Elvis star.
“That was insane,” Butler told Jimmy Kimmel, who also attended the celebration, on the comedian’s late-night show Monday (June 17).
Four days before his birthday, McCartney and Wings released their new live album, One Hand Clapping. The star also recently unveiled his Eyes of the Storm photo exhibit at The Brooklyn Museum in New York City, featuring a sprawling collection of his own behind-the-scenes snaps from the early days of Beatlemania with Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon.
In November, McCartney unveiled “Now and Then,” a previously unreleased Beatles track recovered from a low-quality tape. The “Silly Love Songs” singer worked with audio specialists to lift Lennon’s vocals from the recording using AI, a process he called “magical” at the time.
“When we were in the studio, we had John’s voice in our ears,” he added in an interview with BBC Radio 1 last year. “So you could imagine he was just in the next room in a vocal booth or something and we were just working with him again … It’s very special for me to be singing with John again.”
The exact version of the claim that circulated in May 2024, which includes the details of McCartney purchasing the letters only days after sold them and including a note encouraging her not to sell her memories, appears to have been first posted by
By the end of that month, posts repeating the same text appeared across multiple social platforms. One Facebook post dated May 15, 2024, had garnered more than 140,000 reactions and 31,000 shares at the time of this writing.
It is true that McCartney purchased, framed and returned one of the letters Cynthia Lennon sold after her 1968 divorce from John Lennon. However, some details of the viral posts were incorrect or unproven. First, McCartney bought and returned only one of the letters, not all of them. Second, there is no evidence to support the claim that McCartney included a note reading, “Never sell your memories. Love, Paul McCartney.” Finally, the posts do not accurately reflect the timeline of the events, which took place over several years, not a few days. Because of these inaccurate or unproven details, we have rated the claim a “Mixture” of truths and falsehoods.
