I surely don't need to say this, but now I can testify: At 82, Paul McCartney has so much swag it's ridiculous. The Cute One has been a rock paterfamilias for decades, through the ups and downs of a post-Beatles career that once struck his own generation as silly (he wrote a song about that) but which subsequently inspired the ornate pop-rock and pencil mustaches of a new century.

It wasn't a given, though, that he'd still warrant admiration in his silver-mullet years. Adulation, yes — he's still everybody's crush. But plenty of artists, as they age, are rewarded simply for still being with us; it's not expected that they'd bring something that feels fresh. That's what made Macca's brief club run at New York City's Bowery Ballroom last week, leading up to his appearance as the final guest on Saturday Night Live's 50th anniversary special, remarkable. He simply radiated ease. Springsteen sweats; Neil Young teeters and sways. McCartney raises an eyebrow and the room brightens. In the latest triumph of his long touring career, the legend who once said "I don't work at being ordinary" made the case for well-tended finesse.

Having miracled my way into one of those feverishly sought-after Bowery Ballroom shows, I stood yards away from the man who will always be my first crush and saw not the dreamboat I adored at 11 but a showbiz lifer who's performed rock's magic trick so many times that it simply shoots from his fingers. I was reminded of the rewards, health willing, of really marinating in one's own expertise. I thought of the other artists I've seen give great shows late in their careers — most deal with some kind of diminishment; their fingers are no longer so fleet, their voices crackle. Fans root for them partly because of these dents in their perfection. With McCartney, though, perfection was never the goal, exactly. Playfulness, the sense that some small move might open up new pleasures, is what he's all about.

This has long granted him a loose kind of composure, an unfussy self-confidence — that's what people love about his deceptively accessible songs and his huggable presence. On SNL, his vocals were a little rough, but he didn't show one ounce of concern. He'd given his all to those kids at the club; making television history was an afterthought. The slightly ragged aspects of his act did not stop the studio audience from fully losing it — despite the fact that it was a celebrity crowd, usually the most awkward, self-conscious audience imaginable. Tom Hanks bellowed along to "Carry That Weight"; Jason Sudeikis danced in the aisles.

Of course they did. Paul's a Beatle, after all, and even when he's a little messy he's still armed with the croon that superseded Bing Crosby, a yelp that Little Richard himself endorsed, élan only ever matched by Prince and a songbook lodged in a billion people's memory banks. Rock is over as a culturally dominant form, and nobody seems likely to challenge his status as the greatest ever again. He's happy to bask in that glory.

But I'm here to talk about performance, not status. His rare club run, bolstered by a band that has toured with him consistently for two decades plus, offered a rare glimpse into what makes McCartney tick, and therefore what defined rock as pop — as a willfully universal language — for the half-century that followed The Beatles' breakthrough.

What McCartney does so well as a live performer is take care of his audience while appearing to do exactly as he pleases. At the Bowery, he had a ball. He may have been cracking jokes and sharing stories dating from before half the audience was born, but he still made everyone in the room feel that it's all fresh and just for them. That's true for him, whether the venue is a 50,000-seat stadium or this downtown club with a capacity of 575 people; he simply adjusts his enthusiasm to suit the circumstances.

The show I saw was tinged with nostalgia. "This takes me back, man, to the old days," he said early on in the delightfully proficient two-hour Valentine's Day set I caught, mentioning The Beatles' legendary crib The Cavern Club and laying on his Scouse accent thick when a fan shouted that she, too, was from Liverpool. Maybe the way he and the band ripped through a mix of required hits and obscurities did raise thoughts of those grimy early days when Macca and his mates would incorporate slapstick and an inexhaustible array of covers into their offerings from a fledgling songbook. But in fact, the decades that have passed are what made this journey back exciting. He is far from the nerves and flubs and thrilling little wins a really gifted beginner experiences. What he knew, singing the best-known songs in rock to a crowd in ecstasy, is that those fans longed for the music and their love of it to be renewed. Only his commitment and skill could make that happen. So he locked in and made a set he must be sick of shine once again.

This is the magic trick I was talking about, something The Beatles mastered before anyone else: to be pure showbiz and shockingly new at the same time, to know your biz completely and still, somehow, not be bored. To make genius look effortless, funny and fun. To find the unexpected in the familiar. At the Bowery, McCartney explained it with a G-minor chord. He was demonstrating how he and John Lennon would know they were really on to something, using 1963's "From Me To You" as an example. They were writing a song that felt mundane, he said, until one of them hit on that odd progression. It threw things off. They didn't change everything, just that one chord; adding just a bit of shock to the commonplace allowed them to upend listeners' expectations. That's why "From Me To You" is both so hooky and slightly unsettling. It feels like the first days of a new love.

A star who was also a striver, to whom things came easily (some of his best songs, he noted, arrived in dreams) but who also insisted on working hard, McCartney is the guy who gave rock its sense of craft and playful surprise. In the show I saw, as he worked his way through Beatles and Wings classics like "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" (inspired by an African friend, he said, after playing a version that let the ska edge show; " 'bra,' that's 'bro,' " he informed the crowd) and "Let Me Roll It" ("that's for Jimi Hendrix," he said after leading the band to monstrous heights of blues crunch), I kept thinking about the changes in his music, how these songs seem to shift from one kind of tune to another. Every time, he had so many ideas and only three or four minutes to cram them. When I first fell for Macca as a kid living in a white suburban bubble, I didn't realize that he was introducing me to the sounds of music-makers who otherwise didn't fit within rock's marketable image in the 1960s: immigrants, women, older people who loved broad humor and music hall singalongs. In 2025, there is no call for him to be generous about those sources. People are happy to give him all the credit. But he celebrated those wellsprings with a wink, subtly demanding that his audiences think beyond the beloved cliché of The Beatles as unique and hear the connections that have kept him deeply engaged for more than 60 years.

McCartney's craft is the source of his charisma. He builds songs as if they were Bayko model sets, the English kid's Sunday diversion, red blocks plugging into white ones to create castles and warm homes. Friday he played piano, bass, guitar and ukulele; he spun out indelible riffs without fuss or fanfare, and when he rolled up his sleeves and leaned into the innuendo of "Let Me Roll It," the years fell away and his hyper-competence turned into that swag, an unfaded allure. McCartney still likes to talk about his loves, Linda and Nancy (dedicating songs to both), and get a little sexy (yes, superfans, he played "Temporary Secretary"). But his strongest emotions were reserved for the songs themselves, his hardy creations, as he delighted in their twists and turns and bursts of energy.

These precious hours with McCartney felt like a respite from the goings-on in the world outside the Bowery Ballroom's doors: the weather (freezing), the news (paralyzing), the daily toll of life lived on the edge of a perilous future. But they weren't, really. What our hyper-competent hero offered was a coping mechanism. The jejune joys of Beatles faves like "From Me To You" or Wings stoner singalongs like "Let 'Em In" made a sonic argument for living in the moment of sensual bliss when it arises — and it can, however briefly, for those who have the resources and good fortune to make space for it.

When he dipped into his hymnal toward the end of the set, with "Hey Jude" and "Let It Be," McCartney gestured at something more transcendent, even motivating. Yet this moment still felt removed from the strife of this century: We were not in a nostalgia chamber so much as a timeless capsule, a preserve of good taste and humor where competence and taste defeat bad luck and human ugliness. Throughout the show, he occasionally ribbed fans peppering him with requests by calling them "Connoisseurs!" A connoisseur can turn off the world, absorbed in something that tastes great. It's a fleeting pleasure. Should we ask more of culture right now — something more challenging, more incendiary? Maybe. Yes, I think we should. But hanging for a while with the maestro McCartney reminded me of the value in still making time to focus on those unpretentiously amazing things that make life just feel good, and in loving those things for a lifetime, whether you're the maker, ever sharpening your skills, or the enthusiast, taking in the fruits of that labor. Return to what you love; shine it up, turn it around. Then you'll begin, again, to make it better.

Copyright 2025, NPR