At Taylor Swift’s Wedding, Paul McCartney Revived a Beatles Staple He’d Abandoned in 1964

For over six decades, Paul McCartney treated “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as a relic sealed inside 1964. The Beatles’ first U.S. chart-topper remained untouched across his solo career, absent from every Wings tour and every headlining show of his later life. That changed last week, in a room at Madison Square Garden, at Taylor Swift’s wedding reception.

According to People, McCartney was among the A-list performers at Swift and Travis Kelce’s celebration. After the ceremony, Swift’s mother Andrea led guests into a reception room with a stage, where McCartney used the private occasion to play a song he last performed live on September 20, 1964, at the Paramount Theatre, as documented by setlist.fm. To perform it at all required a specific kind of setting — not a stadium, not a broadcast, but an intimate gathering of peers.

The choice felt credible. McCartney and Swift have built a quiet mutual regard since appearing together on the cover of Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians issue in 2020. Weeks before the wedding, McCartney told the BBC that Swift’s fame “rivals that of the Beatles’,” adding, “I don’t think she needs any advice.” Swift, in turn, called him an “eternally exceptional artist” when his album The Boys of Dungeon Lane was released.

The performance says less about nostalgia than about how songs gain new life under precise conditions. McCartney didn’t offer the song to a ticketed crowd or a streaming audience. He gave it to a room that understood what it meant to let a cornerstone of pop history become briefly, and fully, present.