In a phone interview, Mr. McCartney discussed his philosophy for entertaining an audience and the re-emergence of Beatles songs in his show. These are excerpts from the conversation.

At your MetLife concert, there was a fan sitting in front who has seen you over 100 times. How do you please both him and a 20-year-old seeing you for the first time?

You know, I’m kind of aware that there are a few people that have seen the show before. I must say the biggest question I ask myself is, how can they afford it? You’re like, in the front row, and he’s been 107 times! What I really do for both of them is try to do a show that I would like to go and see. So I first of all sit down and think, if I was going to see him, I’d want him to do this, and he couldn’t leave out that, and I really hope he’ll do this. So those songs are the starting point. And then we start to kick things around in rehearsal, and my band will sometimes suggest an idea, or I’ll hear something on the radio and think, we should do that.

Bob Dylan is also on tour now, playing almost exclusively new songs. Can you imagine doing that?

I’ve thought about that a lot. Theoretically, the philosophy is good, because, well, you’re not playing songs you’ve played a lot. But my concern is for the audience. I remember when I went to concerts, particularly when I was a kid, it was a lot of money you had to save up. So I imagine myself going to my show: Would I like to hear him play all new songs? No. I wouldn’t want to do that. I would do a smaller gig and advertise the fact up front — I’d probably call the tour “Deep Cuts” or something, so you knew it was going to be just really deep cuts that only the aficionados would know. I think if I did that, it could be quite fun.

It’s interesting how much you think about the audience being entertained or disappointed.

Having been one, and having spent what for me was a lot of money. And that was very much the Beatles’ philosophy. If you think about our singles, there was an A and a B side. Normally people put a bit of rubbish on the B side, but the Beatles B sides are really always good. We used to call it “value for money.” Because we had all recently been those teenagers that we were now appealing to. It’s funny, Phil Spector, we were really sort of quite in awe of his records, so we met him once, and he said, “Why did you put a good song on the B side?” We said, come on Phil, you’ve got kids out there, you got to give them value for money. And he said, no, what you want to do is you want to put the A side out, and you want to take the vocal off, and put it on the B side, put the backing track on the B side, and call it “Sing Along With ‘She Loves You.’” And we go, no way!