Which night of Paul McCartney‘s 2025 tour was the official opening night — Friday, where he played an only recently announced gig at the Santa Barbara Bowl, or Monday, where he did what had long been announced as the first show, at the Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert? That may seem like a small and unimportant distinction to the non-Macca-heads among us. But for anyone planning to attend his road show coming up, or just following it vicariously, there were good reasons to be curious about the differences between the two shows. (Which is, of course, why we did the vigorous journalistic duty of attending both; see our review of Friday night’s Santa Barbara gig here.) It has to do with the geeky task of nailing down his setlist for the tour, yes, but more significantly, it has to do with nailing down his stamina.
When we last saw McCartney doing a tour on these shores (playing SoFi Stadium, in this region), it was the first half of 2022, when he was still a wee lad of 79. And maybe we were amazed that he was pulling off epic, nearly three-hour shows at the time. Surely, no one would begrudge him cutting that down now to the kind of set that befits mortal men who have to pace themselves at any age, let alone. But the answer was left unclear from the Santa Barbara show, where he performed for a more modest two hours — possibly due to the early residential curfew for that intimate outdoor venue, sure, but also maybe reflecting a new normal for McCartney shows. Which would be fine! No one who attended the coastal warm-up — which McCartney did say was the first night of the tour, after all, and not just a warm-up) would have told anyone it felt like anything less than a full meal.
But now that McCartney fans have the Palm Desert show under their belt, the paradigm for the remainder of the tour is clear: nothing but marathons ahead. He is relishing being able to perform like a long-distance runner each night, and we get to relish the rhapsody in that. He powered this gig all the way to the 2-hours-40-minute mark, never leaving the stage except for a brief encore break. Unlike similarly long Bruce Springsteen shows, a McCartney gig never feels like an act of athleticism;. We never see him sweat — literally or, least of all, figuratively, with his eternally jolly and jaunty stage presence. Yet, to be more than 60 years into a rock ‘n’ roll career and be doing an almost three-hour show where you sing and play about as robustly as you always have — and, swear to God, that’s what he’s doing right now — you’ve got to have a bit of the athlete’s spirit within you. Unless just being an inveterate people-pleaser produces the same result.
McCartney’s show in the desert began the same way the earlier one: with the delirious one-two punch of “Help!” and “Coming Up.” Those happen to be the only two numbers out of the show that he didn’t perform at SoFi three and a half years ago — so, yes, it is a continuation of the Got Back Tour, after some long breaks, and incorporating multitudinous surprises and obscurities is not part of the game. But after an opening like that, you’ve earned the right to do what you want with the rest of the show. And what McCartney and his band of 20-years-plus did with it was raucous and remarkable, even if we saw most of the song selections coming. Almost right from the start, he was reintroducing searing songs that he had apparently cut for time in Santa Barbara, like “Letting Go.” Seeing the show in S.B. and taking note of what got skipped, I had allowed myself to think silly thoughts like: “Well, maybe he is leaving out ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ because it’s too demanding to sing anymore,” or “Maybe he’s gotten tired of doing his usual John tribute, with ‘Here Today,’ or the George salute, with ‘Something’.” Nope… all that stuff is getting a return airing in the full-length shows on this tour, after all.
It’s quite a survey of Wings over America, the Beatles buried under the roar of Shea Stadium, and a handful of more recent solo signposts along the way. As he had on the opening night, McCartney promised the faithful that they would hear “some old songs, some new songs and some in-between songs” — and in this instance, he explained that “new” actually meant “probably about 10 years old — that’s new-ish.” He was specifically referring here to the re-addition of “Come On to Me” (which is only eight years old… come on!). But it also applied to “Now and Then,” the recently completed “final” Beatles track that has its basis in a 1970s Lennon demo — lovely here, as played by Paul and his post-Fab comrades (even if it was difficult to focus on the music and not the manic AI time-warp video on the big screen).
Friday’s Santa Barbara show had been billed as lacking some of the tour’s big production elements, but there were only a few obvious ones that required the Acrisure’s larger footprint. One was the giant platform at the front of the stage that rises high up in the air to allow McCartney do a couple of solo-acoustic songs (“Blackbird,” “Here Today”) while aloft… maybe born out of the idea that folks wouldn’t pay enough attention to the really, really quiet stuff unless the star was lording it over them from on high. They would’ve, but it’s still nice for the people in the loge seats to get to see him at eye level. The other big element not seen in the first show was the full pyro for “Live and Let Die,” with flames you could feel at both the front and rear of the stage, and bombs bursting in air, and some kind of fireworks effect overhead. After that barrage, which must’ve woken up several surrounding desert bedroom communities, Paul stuck his fingers in his ears and scornfully said what the audience was thinking: “Too loud.” (Obviously, it will be just as explosive at the next stop.)
Otherwise, the special effects were not that elaborate, unless you count McCartney’s “magic piano” (one of two he had on stage) and an equally Haight-Asbury-looking electric guitar he played to match. The fireworks, as they say, were mostly in the band’s performances. Abe Laboriel Jr. puts more muscularity into all these songs than you ever could have imagined them carrying, back in their original arrangements; he deserves the title of “basher” almost as much as Keith Moon, but somehow, it’s never so over-the-top that it threatens to overpower the man in front — that’s a wonderful feat. Keyboardist Paul “Wix” Wickens, the longest-standing (circa ’90s) member of this crew, gets a swell organ solo almost right out of the gate that brings home the soul of “Let Me Roll It,” though I’m not sure he ever has a bigger audience moment than when he just plays the doorbell intro of “Let ‘Em In.”
Rusty Anderson never sleeps, getting by far the most impressive guitar solos of the night, though he has some competition in that space from alternating bassist/guitarist Brian Ray and from McCartney himself. It was appropriate that “Letting Go” was reintroduced into the set for Palm Desert after being let go for a night in Santa Barbara: It features no less than three terrific guitar solos from Ray, a Palm Springs resident getting to play a hometown show, for once. But when it comes time to pay homage to Jimi Hendrix with the instrumental excerpt of “Foxy Lady” that is traditionally appended to “Let Me Roll It,” only McCartney himself would have the chutzpah to step into those shoes, so it’s the man himself doing the soloing there. Of course, when all three of them team up for the round-robin soloing on the climactic “The End,” it’s a quick bit of manna from jam-band heaven.
With Wings nostalgia in the air — a greatest-hits album and book this fall; a documentary next year — it’s ironic, in a way, to think that McCartney has had for almost 25 years the solid band that eluded him during the decade of Wings. All he had to do was give up the idea of a group that would be anything other than a traditional backup band, yet give them just enough leash each night that they all seem to have having the time of their lives a quarter-century in.
And is Paul himself really having a grand time? I don’t think you sing with as many delightful vocal flourishes as McCartney does over the course of almost three hours if on any level you’re phoning it in, however many successive years he’s been performing some of these selections now. He could be saving his voice for hour 3, or night 3, or the tour finale, but there’s very little sense of that as he consistently delivers above and beyond the basic level that he could (and, some vocal coach might argue, should) be putting out at this stage in his career. In Palm Springs, he sounded more solid from the outset than he did in Santa Barbara (though it didn’t take him long to get there at the earlier show). Maybe it’s illusory, but he sounds better now than he did on the 2023 tour. Of course, that could be a function of it being early in; as McCartney told the audience at the start, “it’s the second night of the tour, so we’re young and fresh and restless.” But he’s doing shorter bursts of touring now anyhow, so there is every reason to imagine that whatever he’s doing to sound this strong will be maintained. Honestly: when it comes to Paul McCartney still sounding like Paul McCartney, prepare to be delighted.
What marks a show of his is the combination of jocularity and generosity. It’s easy for some to underrate him because of his mirthful spirit on stage. But the more the years have advanced, the more I’ve come to appreciate McCartney as a man not just of “silly love songs” but of silly hand gestures. Now, as always, you see him standing up behind the piano between songs and think: What does he think he’s pantomiming?
But, of course, there’s a seriousness of crowd-satisfying intent beneath that casual good humor. He’s not one to make grand pronouncements, the way an equally epic-performance-loving Bruce Springsteen might, about playing each show as if it were your last. But he does each show as if it were the audience’s first. For a majority of attendees, it will be. For those of us with a lot more privilege in having attending his shows (one fellow held up a sign registering the number of gigs he’d attended at “138,” and McCartney responded, “It’s a bit obsessive, but I like it”), it’s not a big stretch for it to feel like the first time.
So when he sang “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” back in the Beatles’ day, and we thought it was something dirty, it never occurred to us that maybe what he was really aspiring to was: running a marathon. In his career, and, better yet, now, every night.
Setlist for Paul McCartney at the Acrisure Arena, Palm Desert, Sept. 29, 2025:
Help!
Coming Up
Got to Get You Into My Life
Letting Go
Drive My Car
Come On to Me
Let Me Roll It/Foxy Lady
Getting Better
Let ‘Em In
My Valentine
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five
Maybe I’m Amazed
I’ve Just Seen a Face
In Spite of All the Danger
Love Me Do
Dance Tonight
Blackbird
Here Today
Now and Then
Lady Madonna
Jet
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Something
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Band on the Run
Get Back
Let It Be
Live and Let Die
Hey Jude
Encore:
I’ve Got a Feeling
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
Helter Skelter
Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End
