THE AMBROSE EHIRIM FILES

BY T BONE BURNETTE JOHN AND PAUL: A LOVE STORY IN SONGS IAN LESLIE, CELADON 433PP The Beatles at the press launch for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” held at the home of their manager Brian Epstein.Credit...John Downing/Getty Images In our culture, music is most often written about in terms of sales, streams and chart positions. That is, of course, the least intelligent way to think about or talk about music. Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs” is unconcerned with all that, but rather it explores the way two extraordinarily gifted young men combined and exchanged their gifts while inspiring, challenging, teaching and learning from each other. In the great teams of composers before John Lennon and Paul McCartney — Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe, Leiber and Stoller, Bacharach and David — one of the members wrote the music and the other wrote the lyrics. John and Paul both wrote music and both wrote lyrics, and they made a decision at the beginning of their ...