At first it seemed completely random. A Tuesday in February, and Paul McCartney was, for some reason, playing a surprise show at the 575-capacity Manhattan venue Bowery Ballroom. Then there was a Wednesday show. And, finally, a Friday special edition, a Valentine’s Day finale to cap off a week of Macca taking over downtown Manhattan before joining in with this weekend’s SNL 50 festivities.

Somehow, this is not the first solo Valentine’s Day I’ve spent watching McCartney play a tiny Manhattan club. Ten years ago, he did something similar, a sneak attack Irving Plaza gig before SNL’s fortieth anniversary. These are the only two times I’ve seen McCartney, and back then it was the kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience I thought, reasonably, none of us would have again. Yet if a maybe slightly over capacity Irving Plaza felt intimate 10 years ago, this was a whole other thing. Bowery Ballroom is less than half the size of Irving. You couldn’t be anywhere in the room without having some sense of “Whoa, that’s Paul McCartney right there.”

While the decade-long gap might’ve had me thinking about where all the time had gone, the legend 50 years my senior didn’t show any of that. As far as I can recall, 82-year-old Paul was just as spry and boyishly excitable as 72-year-old Paul. The energy in the venue was, as you might expect, also a kind of childlike wonder, a disbelief that any of us had made it into that room. Somewhere along the line, McCartney — whose current band includes Paul “Wix” Wickens, Brian Ray, Rusty Anderson, Abe Laboriel Jr, Kenji Fenton, Mike Davis, and Paul Burton — compared it to his early days, playing the Cavern in Liverpool.

I had expected Bowery to be full of celebrities. You could spot a few recognizable faces. Aziz Ansari and Lars Ulrich wrangling with security to let them up into the VIP section on the balcony. Larry David, nonplussed during “Hey Jude” as only Larry David could be. Famed Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles. (I promised Patrick I’d write that.) But as the Macca shows went on, people had caught wind and begun camping out at Bowery overnight in hopes of snagging tickets. (With a chunk of the Ballroom’s floor taken up with their soundboard and guitars, an even more extremely limited amount of spots than expected were available, only via the box office.) I was in the front half of the room, surrounded by people who had waited many, many hours in the cold and were accordingly exuberant on the other side.

In the beginning, it was surreal. I’ve seen countless shows at Bowery since my college days in Manhattan, plenty of artists walk onto its cozy little stage. This time it was a Beatle, nonchalantly coming out and kicking things off with “A Hard Day’s Night.” The setlist followed the patterns of the preceding nights, which meant McCartney wildly swung between some of the biggest hits ever and a few deep cuts or surprises. There were mainstays like “Got To Get You Into My Life” and “Drive My Car” that would make you kinda step back and think how weird it was that songs like that were, what, maybe his thirtieth, fortieth best?

The first big surprise of the evening arrived four songs in. McCartney addressed the audience: “I think we have some connoisseurs here tonight. Are you connoisseurs? Connoisseur this!” After multiple requests on the other nights, the synths of “Temporary Secretary” kicked up. There was a group of younger fans in the middle of the crowd who lost their shit like it was one of the most beloved Beatles tracks, jumping up and down and singing every word.

That was a funny thing to witness across the night, how certain chapters of McCartney’s career have taken on new relevance with different generations. “Let Me Roll It” was massive, and as iconic as “Lady Madonna” later in the set. Even the 2018 cut “Come On To Me” felt surprisingly vital.

But, of course, the beauty of seeing an artist like McCartney is seeing someone able to conjure true universal moments defying age, background, whatever. He busted out “Something” as a tribute to George Harrison mid-set, first in a loping ukulele rearrangement; when the full band kicked in with the song’s wistful lead guitar, the cheers were near feral. “Get Back” prompted so much jumping it almost, for a second, felt like you were at a punk show.

And then there was the ending. I mean, what do you even say about that. You’re in a room, with just a few hundred other people, and Paul McCartney does “Let It Be” and he does “Hey Jude” and milks the crowd for the singalong just long enough, and then he returns for an encore consisting of the “Golden Slumbers”/“Carry That Weight”/“The End” section of the Abbey Road medley. I’ve seen videos of McCartney at Glastonbury, or at a stadium, and thought about how rapturous it must be, surrounded by thousands and thousands singing the “Hey Jude” refrain. But it’s a different kind of rapture, when it’s a few hundred, bottled up in a tiny room in New York, witnessing this for maybe the first time, maybe the last time.

That was the weird thing that stuck with me from the show, though. I’ve seen enough of the old icons to know a certain feeling well, a weird twinge of melancholy that they’re all getting older, and they won’t be around forever. Every time McCartney closes a show by singing “And in the end/ The love you take/ Is equal to the love/ You make” I think it’s a perfect sign-off to everything his career has represented. But that wasn’t really how it felt last night, even with reflective moments like recent Grammy winner “Now And Then,” or stories from sixty years ago. The beauty of seeing McCartney now, in 2025, is watching an 82-year-old who has scaled every mountain that existed and yet his joy has not dimmed at all. The show ended, but he stuck around to say a few more words. It didn’t feel like McCartney was going anywhere else anytime soon.

SETLIST:
“A Hard Day’s Night”
“Junior’s Farm”
“Got To Get You Into My Life”
“Temporary Secretary”
“Let Me Roll It”
“Let ‘Em In”
“My Valentine”
“Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five”
“Every Night”
“I’ve Just Seen A Face”
“From Me To You”
“Blackbird”
“Something”
“Come On To Me”
“I Wanna Be Your Man”
“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
“Drive My Car”
“Get Back”
“Now And Then”
“Lady Madonna”
“Let It Be”
“Hey Jude”
“Golden Slumbers”
“Carry That Weight”
“The End”