Paul McCartney just gave Taylor Swift the ultimate wedding gift. He sang one of the Beatles’ most beloved tunes, for the first time since 1964, the classic hit “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” According to reports in People, he serenaded Travis Kelce and Taylor with this love song at their wedding on July 3, at Madison Square Garden. Busting out the Beatles’ first U.S. Number One for the first time in 62 years? What a mind.
The Beatles stopped playing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” live in their early days, and for some reason, Paul has never revived it before, on any of his solo tours. But for this occasion, it was the perfect song. It’s a love story — baby, just say yeah, yeah, yeah.
So far, the details about the wedding are still locked down tight, so we can only imagine what it sounded like. (Though you can feel confident that we’ll see it on film, sooner rather than later.) According to People’s chatty, NDA-defying source, “After the ceremony, Taylor’s mom Andrea invited everyone into the reception room where the stage was set up.” Stevie Nicks also performed — she and Macca are not just two of Swift’s biggest heroes, but two of her most outspoken fans. (No word yet about what Stevie sang, or whether Paul joined her for a “Leather and Lace” duet.)
For the Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was the song that broke them in America, after they were already massive everywhere else, in the first wave of U.S. Beatlemania. They played it on their famous debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, the night they invaded America — just a mile down the road from Madison Square Garden. (Paul and Taylor can both get obsessive about geek details like that.)
“I Want To Hold Your Hand” made the perfect introduction to the Beatles, because it’s their most extravagantly passionate vision of romance. It’s the most jubilant song they ever did, all raw emotion, four crazed boys howling and bashing away, because they need to tell this girl how they feel right now, or else they’ll explode. “I can’t hide!” they scream. “I can’t hide! I can’t hiiiiiiiiide!”
No wonder Taylor understands. She’s also never been any good at hiding her love away. Did she request this song? Or was it Paul’s pick? Either way, it’s fitting, because they’re both true romantics, maybe the deepest ones in pop music.
“The thing is, I’m quite a romantic,” Paul told me in 2021. “And I don’t just mean a boy-girl romance. The songs I fall in love with, they’re songs which ooze loving feelings, and there’s something very quieting, very calming about that. So I often find that’s a route I’m attracted to — just finding the love and putting it in a song.”
The Paul-Taylor connection runs deep. When she brought the Eras Tour to Wembley Stadium, Paul was right there in the pit, mixing it up in the crowd, with his wife Nancy Shevell and daughter Mary, just days after his 82nd birthday. He rocked out wearing his friendship bracelets. It was strangely moving to see footage of the fans circling around him, singing “But Daddy I Love Him” to McCartney, the eternally beloved rock dad.
Taylor’s a friend of the family, dubbing herself the “Tennessee Stella McCartney” on Lover. They hung out at the 2024 Super Bowl, and she just attended his L.A. show in March. But it goes deeper than that, because on so many levels, these two are wired the exact same way. They’re both freakishly obsessed with overdoing it, pushing too hard, playing marathon shows when everyone would be fine with less, dropping in-jokes into the songs for the hardcore fans who pay extra attention. In their classic Rolling Stone Musicians on Musicians interview in 2020, the first thing they did was geek out over their obsession with numerology. They’re pop’s most pathological people pleasers.
But most of all, they’re both permanently hung up on the promise and heartbreaks of true love. They both tend to go overboard emotionally. “You know that it’s a fool who plays it cool,” Paul sang in “Hey Jude,” and Lord knows, neither Paul nor Taylor have ever shown any talent at all for that.
They’re both stars with a sentimental fondness for Madison Square Garden. Paul’s 1970s arena anthem “Rock Show” had the tribute to the audience, “They got long hair in Madison Square!” Taylor sang about the same venue in “The Lucky One,” about a superstar who walks away from the fame for a quiet private life in the country: “She chose the rose garden over Madison Square.” (Both lines are striking because nobody else ever calls it “Madison Square.”)
It was fitting because Taylor and Travis announced their engagement with a photo of the groom on his knees, surrounded by pink and white roses. Getting engaged in an actual rose garden, and then married in Madison Square? So Taylor-coded. Of course she wanted it both ways—she wanted the rose garden AND the screaming fans—and she got it both ways, on her own terms.
Paul was devoted to his wife Linda in a way that was downright bizarre for rock-star marriages at the time. He was only 26 when they got together, but he instantly knew she was the one, and trusted that instinct despite every possible temptation in front of him. They went the entire 1970s without spending a night apart — until the week he went to jail in Japan, in a 1981 pot bust. They stayed madly in love until her death in 1997. There aren’t many love stories like this from rock stars of Paul’s generation, to say the least. But Paul and Linda were ahead of their time.
We know Taylor has always been a fan of the Paul-Linda story. “I would come back from a run with a poem to share and having listened, Linda would say, ‘What a mind,’” Paul once recalled. “It’s going to make a man feel good, that kind of thing.” Years later, Taylor took that story for one of her own love songs, “Sweet Nothing.” As she sings, “On the way home I wrote a poem/You said ‘What a mind.’”
Like Travis Kelce, Paul was a male star who loved having a wife who was famous in her own right, as one of the music world’s top photographers. He took pride in the independent career she built for herself. You can’t forget the scene in Get Back when he brings Linda to the film set, introduces her to one of the cameramen, and then says, “Linda’s a cameraman!” Not quite what Mick Jagger would say.
But that’s Kelce’s style as well. He relishes the role of being Mr. Taylor Swift, revels in it in public. He’s never been threatened by her fame or her money, because he’s got plenty of his own. But he’s also never been daunted by her intellect or her artistry. Instead, he takes pride in that. “I’ve never been a man of words,” he cheerfully admitted to the Wall Street Journal. “Being around her, seeing how smart Taylor is, has been fucking mind-blowing. I’m learning every day.”
“I Want To Hold Your Hand” is a true Lennon-McCartney collaboration, one that John and Paul wrote “eyeball to eyeball,” huddled together at the piano in McCartney’s family home, with his dad in the next room. (Strange but true: McCartney’s father bought the piano from Brian Epstein’s father.) John and Paul locked eyes when they got to that high chord in the chorus — they knew they’d struck gold.
The Beatles got more sophisticated after 1964, more experimental, but “I Want To Hold Your Hand” remains a song that sums up everything they ever had to say. It’s all there in those urgent voices, Ringo crashing the drums, those girl-group handclaps, the head-spinning harmony when they hit that money note on “haaaaand!” It’s a song they wrote after they were already famous, and you can hear that they were aiming it at the massive crowds of loud fans they now faced onstage. It was their direct love song to these girls, with built-in audience cues designed to maximize their screaming. Paul was always the most pro-girl Beatle, the one who never tired of hearing them make noise — even now, onstage, he asks the ladies in the house to give him “a great big Beatles scream.”
Like Taylor, Paul is always pushing on to his new music, rather than dwelling in the past. He just released an amazing new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, with tunes like “First Star of the Night,” “Mountain Top,” and “Momma Gets By.” But on certain occasions, he’ll take a new look at a song from his past that he’s left alone until now. On tour last year, he shocked everyone by singing “Help,” a song he hadn’t sung in full since the Beatles. It was so resonant to hear him revisit the desperate words that John Lennon wrote as a 24-year-old boy — just as it’s resonant for him to revive “I Want To Hold Your Hand” as a theme song for the Taylor-Travis love story.
“There’s a theory that the most interesting love songs are about ones about love gone wrong,” Paul wrote in his book The Lyrics. “I don’t subscribe to it.” You couldn’t ask for a more perfect summary of his worldview — the one he shares so deeply with Taylor. And you couldn’t ask for a better wedding blessing to bestow on them than “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” So cheers to the newlyweds. May they always be this close.
