Paul McCartney Closes SNL With Surprise Encore

Paul McCartney didn’t just close out SNL’s Season 51 — he took it over. The Beatles legend returned to Studio 8H on Saturday night as musical guest for the Will Ferrell-hosted finale, delivering three full performances, sketch comedy, monologue time, and a surprise encore during the goodnights that nobody saw coming. He’s done SNL five times now. He keeps finding new ways to make it feel like the first.

His opening number was “Days We Left Behind,” the lead single from his upcoming album The Boys of Dungeon Lane, out May 29. The song is reflective and a little bittersweet — somewhere between “Things We Said Today” and “Auld Lang Syne” — and it landed exactly the way you’d expect a Paul McCartney song about the passage of time to land when performed live by Paul McCartney. Emotional. Quietly devastating. Beautiful.

Then came the gut-punch.

Most people assumed the second slot would bring another new track. Instead, McCartney and his band launched into “Band on the Run” — the full, five-minute version of the 1974 Wings classic that hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The audience audibly gasped. That sound — a room full of people catching their breath at once — is maybe the best review a song can get.

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Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers was on drums for both performances, which made the whole night feel like a bit of a rock-and-roll family reunion. Smith also appeared in Ferrell’s monologue, playing into the long-running joke about the two men’s uncanny resemblance to each other.

The Sketch, the Goodnights, and the Encore Nobody Expected

McCartney didn’t spend the rest of the night just watching from the wings. He showed up in a sketch alongside Ferrell and Marcello Hernández, playing mechanics who take advantage of a clueless Mikey Day — a bit that was considerably filthier than anything you’d expect from a knight of the British Empire. He was, by all accounts, very funny.

But the real moment came at the end. After Ferrell wrapped up the goodnights — thanking the night’s cameos, including Molly Shannon, Aziz Ansari, and Smith — he ushered McCartney back to the side stage. What followed wasn’t a wave and a bow. McCartney kicked into “Coming Up,” his 1980 Hot 100 No. 1, while the SNL cast danced around him in the wings. The closing credits rolled. Nobody left.

Reports from the room suggest the band kept going even after the cameras cut — playing at least two more songs for the studio audience once the broadcast ended. The man turns 84 next month. He outlasted the show.

It’s worth putting this in context: three songs is genuinely rare for an SNL musical guest. The standard is two. Lorne Michaels doesn’t hand out extra slots lightly, and giving McCartney the full five-minute “Band on the Run” — a song that would normally be considered too long for the format — says everything about where he sits in the SNL universe. This was his fifth appearance as musical guest, with previous slots in 1980, 1993, 2010, and 2012. He last performed on the show more than 13 years ago. Last year, he closed out SNL’s 50th anniversary special with a medley of the final three songs on Abbey Road.

Lorne knows what he has. And Saturday night, so did everyone watching.