I decided to get the White Album, the Beatles only double album, a welcome departure from Magical Mystery Tour, but not quite as good as subsequent albums, in my opinion.
I played the CD in the car on the way home. In a weird way it was like seeing an old friend for the first time in years. The first track I listened to was Birthday, a vamped up, cheesy ,and happy-go-lucky birthday song. The very next song is Yer Blues, which opens with John Lennon proclaiming, "Yes I'm lonely. Wanna die." The sort of natural high inspired by Birthday is wiped away in the first five seconds of Yer Blues. The contrast between these first two tracks was striking and immediately apparent. According to some it's the kind of contrast that helped make the Beatles great. Paul's "yeah-yeah-yeah's" and John's "wanna die's" represent the inevitable highs and lows, good times and bad that paint our lives.
It's funny what stands out when listening with 27 year old ears, as opposed to teenager ears. Sad songs seem sadder given a deeper contextual backdrop. Happy songs are richer and more alive than they ever were growing up. I realized that no song is written in a vacuum. Instead they are dressed in the pain, beauty, disappointment, and fears of the song writer. An early death of a parent, abandonment, ecstasy, the birth and death of a friendship. These things lie hiding behind the words and notes. The more the listener experiences in his or her own life the more these things begin to peek out into the open.
