5pm_weds | thirty-four (theme: the beatles)

A Day In the Life
The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
1967

I think I have a tendency to over-complicate things.

I am endlessly pleased and surprised by how much I have learnt from this community and how much it has changed me. Take the over-complication, for example--I was so busy wrestling with this week's theme that I got kind of lost and increasingly anxious. I was so far off the mark that I wasn't thinking about the Beatles' music anymore...it's like I wasn't thinking about music at all. The same thing used to happen when I wrote papers in university...the essay would become this snarling beast and I would manage to get myself so worked up that I couldn't connect with the material anymore.

So, I decided to relax and to go back to the songs that I love.

I've been thinking a lot about that article you sent me ever since I read it. I keep going back to the idea that it's fear that initially triggers the music-evoked frisson. This wasn't a favourite Beatles song of mine for a long time. Quite frankly, it scared me. That transition between John's half of the song and Paul's half made me queasy and nervous. I was both fascinated and jarred by the album cover--that pastiche of the dead and the living...and I had seen a Beatles documentary when I was younger...all the clues that "Paul is dead"...the sound of a record playing backwards (or like the skipping record sound at the end of this song).

Music is such a perfect example of how we grow and change over time. Our tastes change and our shaped by our experiences. Somewhere along the line this became one of my favourite Beatles songs. I love that this song is a bit of a car crash...a collision between John's psychedelic bent and Paul's upbeat rock and roll one. Later Beatles albums are my favourite Beatles albums...I love how daring they are and how strange they can be. I love John's voice in this song...thin, but pleasantly so. I love that opening line...and "he blew his mind out in a car." The line I can't help but say with him is "I love to turn you on", which is interesting because I used to find it really off-putting (especially because it led into that cacophonous symphony).

I picked this song because it is the one that resonates most with me. Not because of the words, but because of the feelings that surround it...the idea or possibility of overcoming something that kind of scares you or makes you nervous. Growing up, The Beatles was my dad's band. Later, when I grew to love The Beatles, and let myself acknowledge that love, it was like overcoming another fear hurdle...did it mean that I approved wholeheartedly of my dad? Or that we were more similar than I would have liked (at the time)? Did it mean that I was somehow favouring him over my mother...or relating to him in a better way? Admitting that I loved The Beatles was like admitting that my dad and I had a connection. Not only that, but that I wanted that connection. I'm happy The Beatles--and all music, really--has given us that to hold on to.