love story

What is there left to know about Paul McCartney in 2025? Actually, quite a bit. The octogenarian megastar is seemingly ever-present, popping up on social media feeds with his affable avuncularity, his relentlessly sunny, two thumbs up ‘tude. Yet despite the steady trickle of Beatles scholarship that continues to be published, including Ian Leslie’s insightful book, “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” earlier this year, McCartney is a cipher, a blank page. He has masterfully created the illusion of transparency, yet his life remains stubbornly opaque. Does the man ever lose his temper? Has he ever cheated on his taxes? If there is a chink in McCartney’s armor, we are still looking for it.

Denny Laine, Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney and Denny Seiwell in Osterley Park, London, in 1971.

(Barry Lategan / MPL Communications )

Yet according to this new book, an oral history of McCartney’s band Wings, there is still much to be excavated from what is the most examined life in pop music history, especially when it comes from the horse’s mouth. The book is ostensibly “authored” by McCartney even though it is an oral history that has been edited by Ted Widmer, an estimable historian and a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton. Widmer has also written third-person interstitial information to guide the reader through the story.

Stitching together interviews with McCartney, his wife Linda, erstwhile Beatles, and the various musicians and other key players who found themselves pulled into the Wings orbit across the nearly decadelong tenure of the band, “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run” is a smooth, frictionless ride across the arc of McCartney’s ’70s career, when he continued to mint more hits, and secured a lock on a massive career that is presently in its 55th year.

Joe English, Jimmy McCulloch, Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney and Denny Laine in 1976.

(Clive Arrowsmith / MPL Communications)

Hard as it is to fathom, McCartney has had pangs of doubt concerning his art and career, never more so than in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles’ breakup in 1970, when he found himself at loose ends, unsure of how to follow up the most spectacular first act in show business history. In the immediate aftermath of that epochal event, McCartney retreated to a 183-acre sheep farm on the Kintyre Peninsula in Argyllshire, Scotland, with his wife Linda and their young family. According to the book, there was uncertainty about his ability to write songs that could stand alongside his Beatles work. Hence, his first solo offering, “McCartney,” was mostly tentative, half-baked notions for songs, interlaced with a few fully realized compositions like “Maybe I’m Amazed,” all recorded by McCartney in his home studio.

Home recording sessions for the McCartney album in London, 1970.

( Linda McCartney / © 1970 Paul McCartney under exclusive licence to MPL Archive LLP)

But the gentleman farmer couldn’t stay down on the farm for long. Eventually, the old impulse to be in a band and to perform became McCartney’s new imperative, but he would go about it in an entirely different way. No more camping out in Abbey Road studios, the Beatles’ favorite laboratory, hiring out string sections and horn sections, ruminating over tracks for as long as it took. McCartney would instead take an incremental DIY approach, starting modestly and progressing accordingly. Instead of meticulously recording tracks, records would be dashed off spontaneously. Bob Dylan became a kind of North Star for how to approach a record: “Bob Dylan had done an album in a week,” says McCartney in the book. “I thought, ‘That’s a good idea.’’’

Paul McCartney, Wings Over the World tour, Philadelphia, 1976.

(Robert Ellis / MPL Communications)

It was around this time that McCartney hired Denny Laine, who became (aside from wife Linda) the only full-time member of Wings for the duration of the band’s life. The two had met years earlier, when the Beatles were partying in Birmingham with Laine and his band the Diplomats. “Truth be told, I needed a John,” McCartney admits in the book. The first Wings album, “Wild Life,” recorded in a barn on McCartney’s Scotland farm, was critically savaged, but listening to it now, it retains a certain homespun charm, the amiable slumming of a master musician tinkering with various approaches because he can and because it’s fun. A short tour of universities around the U.K. further contributed to the low-key vibe that McCartney was intent on maintaining; he was waiting for the right time to pounce on the American market, specifically, and reclaim his mantle as the King of Pop.

1973’s “Band on the Run” would be the album that cracked it wide open again for McCartney, but he was still in a rambling mood, this time eager to try one of EMI’s studios in Lagos, Nigeria. “It wasn’t the sort of paradise we thought it would be,” McCartney is quoted in the book, “but it didn’t matter, because we were basically spending a lot of time in the studio.” Once in Africa, Paul, Linda and Denny Laine were mugged, their tapes stolen. Another night, they were guests of the master afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, who invited the three to his Afrika Shrine club for an indelible performance: “It hit me so hard,” says Paul. “It was like boom, and I’ve never heard anything as good, ever, before or since.”

McCartney II recording sessions, Lower Gate Farm, Sussex, 1979.

(Linda McCartney / © 1979 Paul McCartney under exclusive licence to MPL Archive)

“Band on the Run” became an international smash and McCartney once again found himself playing arenas and stadiums with yet another iteration of Wings. It is also at this point that the story of Wings settles into a more of an “album-tour-album” narrative, save for a harrowing drug bust for pot in Japan on the eve of a Wings tour in January 1980, when McCartney spent nine days in jail. “I had all this really good grass, excellent stuff,” explains McCartney, who had cavalierly packed it in his suitcase. Once in jail he had to “share a bath with a bloke who was in for murder,” organizing “singsongs with other prisoners” until his lawyers arranged for his release. The bust would presage the dissolution of Wings; McCartney would release a solo album, “McCartney II,” in May.

Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Denny Seiwell and Denny Laine. Promotional photo shoot for “Wild Life,” 1971.

(Barry Lategan / © 1971 MPL Communications)

How you feel about the albums that Wings made after 1975’s excellent “Venus and Mars” will perhaps affect your judgment of the back half of “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.” But even a charitable fan will have a hard time making a strong claim for the albums that followed 1975’s “Venus and Mars,” which includes “London Town,” “At the Speed of Sound” and “Back to the Egg.” The book’s best stuff is to be found at the start, when the superstar was making his first baby steps toward renewed relevance, and then found it.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

Taylor Swift has a lot to be happy about — including a ring she says she could watch “like it’s a TV.”

The “Bejeweled” pop star hit “The Graham Norton Show” Friday to promote her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” and the host swiftly congratulated her on the “new bit of finger jewelry.”

“He really crushed it when it came to surprising me,” Swift said of fiancé Travis Kelce’s marriage proposal. “He went all out. 10 out of 10.”

The “Norton Show” appearance marks the first time the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter has addressed this new chapter of her love story with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end on TV. In August, the high-profile couple announced they were engaged with a joint Instagram post that looked straight out of an enchanted garden.

According to Swift, the viral photos were not staged. While the couple were recording an episode of Kelce’s podcast, “New Heights,” the three-time Super Bowl champion was having his backyard transformed for the romantic occasion. (Kelce’s father, Ed, let it slip shortly after the announcement that the proposal had happened at Travis’ home in Lee’s Summit, Mo.) Among the added greenery were a few strategically placed hedges where Swift’s tour photographer could capture the proposal unnoticed.

“It’s really fun that we actually have the exact moment” when he proposed, Swift said.

Television is not the only place where Swift has been unable to stop gushing about her fiancé.

Fans have been meticulously dissecting the lyrics on all of the tracks on Swift’s latest album and there are plenty of nods to Kelce. The most explicit, according to Swifties and Swiftologists, is “Wood,” which is being described as her horniest and most openly sexual song to date.

Times pop music critic Mikael Wood describes the song as “a kind of kiddie-disco number that … exults in the erotic thrill of a guy brandishing ‘new heights of manhood,’” pointing out the reference to Kelce’s podcast. Among the other lyrics that are causing a frenzy among fans include references to a “Redwood tree,” how “his love was thе key that opened [her] thighs” and “a hard rock [being] on the way.”

Clearly, Swift is just as giddy about her upcoming nuptials as Kelce.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement may have kicked off a major earthquake in the real world this week, but it hasn’t put serious seismic activity into the lives of the spouses-to-be: They were spotted out Thursday night in a luxury box catching — wait for it — a college football game, where Swift took her new engagement ring out for a test drive.

It was the first game of the 2025-26 NCAA season for the hometown University of Cincinnati Bearcats, the Kelce brothers’ alma mater, who lost to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Cornhuskers by a field goal at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo. The bros (Jason was there too) were rooting for the Bearcats, obviously, with Travis rocking a street-art emblazoned Cincinnati cap and his older sibling sported a more traditional college typeface on his chapeau.

Swift rocked a denim miniskirt, according to People, with a white sweater, white boots, green nails and, oh yes, that massive engagement ring. The Old Mine Cut diamond ring was designed by Travis Kelce and New York City-based jewelry designer Kindred Lubeck, according to myriad media reports.

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While experts who talked to People put the size of the stone at between 5 and 10 carats and guesstimated its value as anywhere from $125,000 to $5 million — which is quite the range — folks who talked to Page Six said it likely came with a $1-million price tag. Basically, nobody knows the value of a custom-made, vintage-style ring with a one-of-a-kind hand-etched diamond that is currently sitting on the ring finger of a global pop star. Go figure.

“It’s my engraved pieces that put me on the digital map,” Lubeck told VoyageJacksonville in 2024. “I started making reels showcasing my work and people started noticing. Eventually, I started getting requests for me to make engagement rings.”

The Neptune Beach, Fla., native has described herself as a goldsmith specializing in hand engraving who got started working part time with her jeweler dad in her hometown during the pandemic lockdown.

“Basically, I take very small, sharp instruments and cut away bits of metal, usually on the sides of rings, into a particular design,” she said. “People just go crazy for it when I post it online.”

No kidding: On Friday, Lubeck appeared to be sold out of every big-ticket ring she had been offering on her website, though a handful of sub-$20,000 designs were still in stock. (Swifties, where you at? A bunch of them can be had for less than $5,000! And they’re not even “distressed.”)

The Grammy-winning “Love Story” pop icon and the Kansas City Chiefs tight end announced the beginning of their engagement era on Tuesday in a joint Instagram post.

“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” Swift captioned photos from the garden engagement, which actually took place a couple of weeks earlier.

Kelce’s dad told a Cleveland news station the same day that Travis had popped the question at home in Lee’s Summit, Mo., after months of planning, right before the two headed out for dinner. Before they left, Travis told Taylor, “‘Let’s go out and have a glass of wine.’ … They got out there, and that’s when he asked her, and it was beautiful,” Ed Kelce said.

He added with a happy shrug, “I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say, but I don’t care!”

But Vice President JD Vance definitely cares — about the effects this pairing might have on the NFL this season.

“I will say as a football fan — as a Cincinnati Bengals fan — I hope that the NFL does not put a thumb on the scale for the Kansas City Chiefs just because Travis Kelce is now getting married to maybe the most famous woman in the world,” the veep told USA Today this week.

“You guys can’t sort of have this, ‘I’m worried they’re going to have a Super Bowl wedding’ thing this season. Can’t do it. The Kansas City Chiefs have to follow the same rules as everybody else.”

So in the case that the NFL’s “deep state” turns romantic and favors the Chiefs in this pigskin-tinted love story, Vance is urging fans to be ready to act.

“I think all football fans should be willing to push back on the NFL,” he said, “and say, ‘Look, you guys got to be fair.’”

Fair enough.

Times staff writer Alexandra Del Rosario contributed to this report.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are taking their love story to the next chapter.

The Grammy-winning “Love Story” pop icon and the Kansas City Chiefs tight end are engaged, the couple announced Tuesday in a joint Instagram post.

“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” Swift captioned photos from the garden engagement.

Weeks before getting engaged, the pair hit another personal milestone: They finally finally appeared together on Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast, which he co-hosts with his brother, retired Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce. The podcast was also where Travis Kelce took his shot at a romance with the singer-songwriter back in 2023.

During the “New Heights” episode, which marked Swift’s podcasting debut, she said her relationship with Kelce “is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.”

Swift also announced her upcoming album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” on the podcast.

With marriage on the horizon, it seems Swift and Kelce have come a long way since officially becoming an item in fall 2023. Their romance can be traced back to July 2023, when Kelce attended an Eras tour concert at Arrowhead Stadium, the Chiefs’ house. The NFL star managed to get a friendship bracelet with his phone number to Swift’s camp and the two eventually got in touch.

Their rumored romance quickly became commentary fodder for NFL broadcasts (sometimes to sports fans’ chagrin). Then things took a turn when Swift seemingly accepted Kelce’s personal invitation to a home game in September 2023 and was seen cheering for him in a private box alongside his mother, Donna Kelce. Soon enough, Swift became a staple in the Chiefs audience.

Swift and Kelce’s relationship dominated the news cycle and most coverage of the NFL season. Feeding into the obsession, both Swifties and sports fans on social media created memes, TikTok videos and other social media content dissecting nearly every detail of the couple’s interactions and public appearances.

From late 2023 to early 2024, their blooming relationship also proved to be a boon as Swift carried on with her blockbuster, career-spanning Eras tour and Kelce prepared for Super Bowl LVIII, where the Chiefs faced the San Fransisco 49ers. When the Chiefs won, Swift joined Kelce on the field, kissing and hugging her athlete boyfriend.

Swift and Kelce’s love didn’t just play out on the field. During a November 2023 show, Swift changed lyrics to her hit “Karma” to mention “the guy on the Chiefs, coming straight home to me,” sending fans and Kelce into a frenzy. Then in June 2024, as Swift‘s tour continued, Kelce joined his superstar girlfriend on stage in London.

When the 2024-25 NFL season began in September, Swift returned regularly to Arrowhead Stadium for Chiefs home games.

Swift brought her Eras tour to an end in December 2024 and hosted a private wrap party to celebrate her musical marathon. As photos from the party went public, eagle-eyed fans noticed more than Swift, Kelce and their VIP attendees. Social media sleuths claimed photos of Swift’s hands had been Photoshopped to conceal the presence of an engagement ring, Page Six reported at the time.

The day before our interview, cinematographer Darius Khondji tells me he went to see a Pablo Picasso exhibit in uptown New York City. And though he would never compare himself to the Spanish painter, Khondji says he found a kinship in the way he described his artistic practice.

“About his style, he said that he was like a chameleon, changing completely from one moment to another, from one situation to another,” Khondji, 69, recalls via Zoom. “This is exactly how I feel. When I’m with a director, I embrace that director completely.”

Backlit, with natural light coming from the large windows behind him on a recent afternoon, Khondji appears shrouded in darkness, at times like an enigmatic silhouette with a halo of sunshine around his fuzzy hair. The Iranian-born cinematographer speaks animatedly, with hand movements accentuating every effusive sentence.

“Sometimes I talk in a very impressionistic way,” Khondji says, apologetically. “I might be confusing but I try to be just honest and say what I feel.”

Khondji’s eclectic resume flaunts an exceptional collection of collaborations, some of the best-looking movies of their moments: David Fincher’s gruesome but gorgeous “Seven,” Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s darkly whimsical and richly textured “Delicatessen” and “The City of Lost Children,” Michael Haneke’s unflinching love story “Amour,” James Gray’s old-school luxurious “The Immigrant,” the Safdie Brothers’ nerve-racking and kinetic “Uncut Gems,” and now Ari Aster’s paranoid big-canvas pandemic saga “Eddington,” in theaters Friday.

Khondji stands simultaneously as a wise member of the old guard and a hopeful champion for the future of film. Sought in decades past by the likes of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Bernardo Bertolucci, he’s now lending his lensing genius to a new generation of storytellers with ideas just as biting.

“Darius understands the human soul and he masters the tools to express it,” says filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu via email. “All the technical choices — framing decisions, uses of color and lighting techniques — he is able to apply them, but always subordinated to the director’s vision and, most importantly, to the needs of the film itself.”

Khondji, left, with director Alejandro González Iñárritu on the shoot of 2022’s “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.”

(SeoJu Park / Netflix)

Khondji earned his second Oscar nomination for his work on the Mexican director’s surrealist 2022 film “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.” The motion picture academy first acknowledged his artistry with a nod for Alan Parker’s sumptuous 1996 musical “Evita.”

“Darius is kind of a poet — everything is feeling-based with him,” says Aster via video call from Los Angeles. “He is an intellectual but he is also decidedly not.”

If you were to dissect the pivotal memories that shaped Khondji’s creative mind, the array of touchstones would include a photograph of Christopher Lee as Dracula that his brother would bring him from London. Also in prime of place: an image of his older sister, Christine, whom he considers an artistic mentor.

You would also find the intense orange color of persimmons squashed in his family’s garden in Tehran during winter — the only sensory memory he has from his early childhood before his family moved to Paris when he was around 3 1/2 years old in the late 1950s.

“Sometimes I look at my granddaughter and grandson and say, ‘OK, they are 3, almost 3 1/2, so this is the amount of language I had, but it was probably mostly in Farsi,’” he says. Khondji returned to Iran only once, as a teenager in the early 1970s, with a Super 8 camera in hand.

He has been watching movies since infancy. His nanny, an avid moviegoer, would take him to the cinema with her. And later, his father, who owned movie theaters in Tehran and would source films through Europe, brought him along to Parisian screening rooms as a kid.

“These are all stories told to me and a mix of impressions and feelings of things that I remember,” Khondji explains. That visceral, heart-first way of perceiving the world around him might be the defining quality of his approach to image-making. It’s always about how something feels.

“Cinema is a strong force,” he says. “You cannot limit it only with aesthetic taste or things that you like or don’t like or rules. You just have to go with the flow and give yourself to it. You need a lot of humility.” At that last thought, Khondji laughs.

Cinematographer Darius Khondji, photographed in France in 2021.

(Ariane Damain Vergallo)

When he started making his own Dracula-inspired short films on Super 8 as a teenager, Khondji had little idea about the distinct roles of a film production. Slowly, he started noticing that the directors of photography for the movies he liked were often the same artists.

“I was discovering that some films looked incredible — they had a very strong atmosphere,” Khondji recalls. “Then I found that the same name of one person was on one movie and then another movie, and I thought, ‘OK, this person really is very important.’” He mentions Gregg Toland, the legendary shooter of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”

But it wasn’t until Khondji attended NYU for film school that he dropped his aspirations for directing and decided on becoming a cinematographer. His film exercises leaned more toward the experiential than the narrative. He refers to them as “emotional wavelengths.”

“It’s really the director and the actors that trigger my desire to shoot a movie,” says Khondji. “The script is, of course, a great thing, but once I want to work with the director, I really trust them.”

Hearing Khondji speak about directors, it’s clear that he puts them in a privileged light — so much so that he makes a point of creating what he calls a “family” around them to ensure their success. This means he ensures the director feels comfortable with the gaffer, the dolly grip, the key grip, so that there’s no one on set that feels like a stranger.

With Aster, for example, their bond emerged from a shared voraciousness for film. The pair had several hangouts together before a job even entered the equation. Khondji is a defender of the polarizing “Beau Is Afraid,” his favorite of Aster’s movies. “Eddington” finally brought them together as collaborators for the first time.

“Ari and I have a common language,” he says. “We discovered quite early on working together that we have a very similar taste for dark films, not dark in lighting but in storytelling.”

Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”

(A24)

While scouting locations in Aster’s native New Mexico, he and Khondji came across the small town where the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” was filmed. And though they both revere that arid 2007 thriller, they wanted to get away from anything tied to it, so they pivoted again to the community of Truth or Consequences.

Khondji recalls Aster describing his film, about a self-righteous sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) in a grudge match against the mayor (Pedro Pascal), as “a European psychological thriller on American land.” For the cinematographer, the movie is “a modern western.”

“We wanted the exterior to be very bright, like garishly bright, like the light has almost started to take off the color and the contrast a little bit because it’s so bright, never bright enough,” explains Khondji about shooting in the desert.

For Khondji, working Aster reminded him of his two outings with Austria’s esteemed, ultra-severe Michael Haneke, with which the cinematographer made the American remake of “Funny Games” and “Amour,” the latter on which he discovered a “radically different kind filmmaking” where “everything in the set had to have a grace of realness.”

“‘The color is vivid in a way that it isn’t in any of his other films,” says Aster about the quality that Khondji brought to “Amour,” Haneke’s Oscar-winning film.

Still, after working with some of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers on features, music videos, commercials and a TV show (he shot Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2019 “Too Old to Die Young” and became infatuated with the San Fernando Valley), Khondji prefers to be reinvigorated by younger artists challenging the rules.

“‘Uncut Gems’ was like turning a page for me in filmmaking,” he says, calling out to Josh and Benny Safdie. “These two young filmmakers were making films in a different way. And the fact that I could keep up with them — they are in their 30s — psychologically, it gave me a lot of strength.” Khondji also shot Josh Safdie’s upcoming “Marty Supreme,” out in December.

Is there a visual signature that defines Khondji’s work? Perhaps, even if he doesn’t consciously think of it. A lushness, a preference for olive greens and blacker-than-black shadows. An intense fixation on color in general. There are also aesthetic preferences that Aster noticed from their work on “Eddington.”

“Darius and I hate unmotivated camera movement,” Aster says. “But there are certain things that never would’ve bothered me compositionally that really bothered Darius, and now they’re stuck in my head. For instance, Darius hates it when you cut off somebody’s leg, even if it’s at the ankle. A lot of Darius’s prejudices have gone into my system.”

Khondji concedes to these particularities, yet he doesn’t think in rigid absolutes.

“You have a rule, and then you decide this is the moment to break the rule,” he says, citing the rawness of the films of French director Maurice Pialat or how actor Harriet Andersson looks directly into the camera in Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 “Summer with Monika.”

He recently watched Ryan Coogler’s box-office hit “Sinners” without knowing anything about its premise beforehand. “People who know me know that I don’t like spoilers,” he says. “I’m very cautious with film reviews. They are very important, but at the same time, I don’t want to know the story.”

Khondji had never seen one of Coogler’s films, but was impressed. “I really enjoyed it,” he says. “After I watched it I wanted to know who shot the film, but I enjoyed the actors so much and I love just being a real member of the audience.”

It might surprise some to learn that Khondji’s initial interest in seeing a film is unrelated to how it looks or who shot it.

“When I watch a film people say, ‘Oh, did you notice how it was shot?’ And I don’t really go for that,” he says. “I mostly go to watch a film for the director.”

These days, his wish list includes the opportunity to shoot a proper supernatural horror film (Aster might be handy to stay in touch with) and for a company to make a modern film-stock camera. Khondji is not precious about format but believes shooting on film should stay an option as it is the “natural medium” of cinema.

He tells me how much he loves going to the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. “It’s really like a shrine for me,” he says, recalling seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” there on true VistaVision.

“It was an incredible emotion,” he adds. “Like the emotion I had when I grew up with my dad, when they would take me to see big films in the cinemas where the ceiling had stars to make you dream even before the film started.”

That dream is what Khondji is still chasing, in the cinema and on set.