Paul McCartney Unleashes Age-Defying 150-Minute Hit Parade at The Pinnacle

11.7.2025.PaulMccartneypinnacle-2247.jpg — Paul McCartney at The Pinnacle, 11/6/2025
Photo: Angelina Castillo

On Thursday morning, the Scene was treated to a media tour of the Frist Art Museum’s brand-new exhibit Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-’64: Eyes of the Storm. Amid a treasure trove of photos, taken by Paul McCartney early in The Beatles’ career and recently unearthed, is a simple quote from the man himself, painted onto the gallery wall: “When I look back and think, wow, we did that, and we’re just kids from Liverpool. And here it is in these photographs. Boy, how great does John look? How handsome is George and how cool is Ringo, wearing his funny French hat?” This is perhaps the quintessential McCartney quote. Cheeky. Informal. In the midst of a historical catalog of iconic imagery, impossibly understated.

A high-tech midsize venue in downtown Nashville named for a bank is a far cry from the grimy Hamburg and Liverpool clubs where The Beatles got their start 65 years ago. Even so, at a capacity of 4,500, The Pinnacle is a significant underplay for Sir Paul’s current Got Back tour, which most commonly hits arenas and will come to a close — after three-and-a-half years and roughly 80 dates — with a two-night stand at Chicago’s 20,000-plus-capacity United Center later this month. Thursday’s show in Nashville was a nearly instant sellout, with most ticket prices in the four-figure range. As the scrum of attendees — many of them well-heeled boomers in quarter-zip fleeces — crowded toward the entrance just before 8 p.m., we overheard a few tales of folks being ripped off by bogus tickets on the resale market.

11.7.2025.PaulMccartneypinnacle-2270.jpg — Paul McCartney at The Pinnacle, 11/6/2025
Photo: Angelina Castillo

With no new records from McCartney since 2020, Got Back is a hit parade by design. Thursday’s show was a 150-minute marathon of nearly three dozen songs pulled from all over the McCartney, Wings and Beatles catalogs, backed by a band of stellar musicians Macca has played alongside for nearly three times as long as The Beatles were even a band. With no opener, McCartney took the stage unceremoniously at 8:30 p.m., iconic Hofner bass in hand and accompanied by his longtime sidemen — guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray, drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. and keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist Wix Wickens. The top of the set was Fab Four-heavy, with “Help!,” “Got to Get You Into My Life” and “Drive My Car” all taking spots in the rapid-fire five-song opening run.

“We’ve got some stuff for you tonight,” McCartney told the crowd in that understated manner of his. “And no phones!”

Indeed, attendees were required to stuff our phones into locked pouches at the top of the show, and the vibe certainly didn’t suffer for it. The first half of the set was relatively light on banter, with Macca occasionally riffing lightly between tunes, telling us “too bad” if we don’t know latter-day single “Come On to Me” and reading messages from fans’ signs. (After spotting one reading “I’m gay, help me come out,” McCartney told the fan to repeat after him: “‘I’m gay! I’m gay! I’m gay!’ There. You’re out.”)

11.7.2025.PaulMccartneypinnacle-2166.jpg — Paul McCartney at The Pinnacle, 11/6/2025
Photo: Angelina Castillo

As McCartney bounced from bass to guitar to piano, vaguely progressive footage flashed on screen behind him — Pride flags, Greta Thunberg, psychedelic flowers springing up amid the ruins of a postapocalyptic wasteland — as well as archival footage and photos of John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. There are certain tricks Sir Paul has been pulling from his bag for quite some time, including a touching, ukulele-centric version of “Something,” a “superb” song written by his friend George. There was also his solo, spotlit rendition of “Blackbird” (though Paul didn’t rise above the crowd on a platform, as he often does when playing the song at larger venues), which he followed with a brief but oft-cited anecdote about a 1964 Beatles gig in Jacksonville, Fla.: The band refused to play to a segregated audience, leading the promoter to simply integrate Beatles fans — unheard of in the South at the time. As McCartney tells it in his understated manner, the group wasn’t trying to make a political statement. They simply thought separating fans by race was a “stupid” thing to do.

Other set highlights included a snippet of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” at the tail end of “Let Me Roll It,” a speed-run of Beatles lore after a rendition of The Quarrymen’s “In Spite of All the Danger” and pillars of smoke punctuating the percussive moments of “Live and Let Die.” (Probably for the best that Macca & Co. skipped the meme-worthy pyrotechnics that accompany that one during outdoor performances.) The Hot City Horns bolstered tunes like “Coming Up.” “Letting Go” from Wings’ Venus and Mars proved McCartney still has his falsetto.

11.7.2025.PaulMccartneypinnacle-2338.jpg — Paul McCartney at The Pinnacle, 11/6/2025
Photo: Angelina Castillo

As the show stretched past the two-hour mark, I realized this was probably an endurance test for many of the old-timers in the audience. It’s a blessing for anyone to be alive and upright at age 83 — it’s a downright miracle for someone of that age to deliver a cavalcade of hits while hitting cues and remembering lyrics written, in some cases, six-plus decades ago. As McCartney did some vocal vamping during the main-set-closing “Hey Jude,” it began to seem like he could have gone on for another two hours.

Throughout a time-tested encore run that included “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Helter Skelter” and “Golden Slumbers” (among others), a single word began echoing through my mind. I found it scrawled in my notebook the morning after: “How?” How is this man able to do this? How are we so lucky that we get to see him play two-and-a-half hours of banger after banger in this, the Year of our Lord 2025? How does he have the stamina of a performer less than half his age?

Sometimes there are no answers. Sometimes all you can say, to paraphrase the man himself, is: Wow. He did that.

Set List