HE WROTE IT THE YEAR THE BEATLES ENDED — LONDON, 1969. HE’D MARRY LINDA THAT MARCH AND STAY MARRIED FOR 29 YEARS. IN THOSE 29 YEARS, THEY WOULD SPEND EXACTLY 10 NIGHTS APART — AND ONLY BECAUSE HE WAS IN A TOKYO JAIL. ROLLING STONE WOULD LATER RANK “MAYBE I’M AMAZED” THE #1 SOLO SONG ANY EX-BEATLE EVER RECORDED. Nobody expected Paul McCartney to write the simplest love song of his life on the year his band died. He sat at the black Steinway they’d bought after the wedding, depressed, drinking, watching the empire crumble. Linda Eastman — the New York photographer who’d walked up to him at the Bag O’Nails two years earlier — was raising their daughters and keeping him upright. “I am privileged to have been her lover for thirty years,” he said the day she died of breast cancer in April 1998. “Except for one enforced absence, we never spent a single night apart. When people asked why, we would say — what for?” In a genre defined by leaving — what does it mean to never want to leave the room she’s in?
The Love Song Paul McCartney Wrote While Everything Else Was Falling Apart There is something almost impossible about “Maybe I’m…