On paper, Back in the World was packed with obvious crowd-pleasers: Beatles classics, Wings anthems, sing-alongs built for arenas. But night after night, it was “Here Today” — quiet, unadorned, and devastatingly personal — that lingered longest after the lights came up.
Midway through the set, the band would fall away. No visuals. No spectacle. Just Paul, an acoustic guitar, and a song written as a letter to John Lennon — a song that refuses easy catharsis. In 2003, more than two decades after John’s death and after a decade-long absence from European touring, the performance landed differently. He wasn’t revisiting grief; he was carrying it.
The delivery was restrained, almost conversational. Paul didn’t oversell the emotion. He let the lyrics do the work. Lines once familiar suddenly felt heavier in arenas filled with fans who had waited ten years just to see him again — many of them hearing this song live for the first time. You could feel the shift in the room: people stopped filming, stopped singing, stopped even breathing normally.
What made the moment unforgettable wasn’t just the tribute to John. It was the timing. Back in the World marked Paul’s return to Europe after years of personal loss, global upheaval, and quiet recalibration. “Here Today” felt less like a song placed in a setlist and more like a pause — a space where Paul acknowledged who was missing, what had changed, and why being back onstage still mattered.
There was no speech afterward. No explanation. The band simply returned, and the show moved on. But audiences knew what they had witnessed. In a tour about reconnection, this was the moment that grounded everything else.
For many fans, that was the highlight — not the biggest hit, not the loudest chorus, but the song that reminded everyone why Paul McCartney returning to Europe after ten years wasn’t just a tour… it was unfinished emotional business finally being spoken out loud.
