152. Song No. 2,338: “A Day in the Life,” The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

Of all the infinite ways to categorize and label The Beatles’ catalogue, for me, there are exactly two: George songs and everything else.

And while “everything else” might land with an undeserved less-than connotation, an awful lot of my favorite Beatles tunes live there, and “A Day in the Life” is their king. As much as I love and prefer George’s solo work, I love this song above everything else The Beatles have, either directly or not, ushered into the universe. (I’ve never really settled on a favorite Beatles’ album but I suppose this is it, or at least the closest thing.)

I tend to think of this as the obverse of “In My Life” (easily one of my top-five Beatles songs), and almost entirely for the titular contrast rather than any thematic one. Still, the parallels are there, if not a little rough-hewn and stretched just a skosh, and they add something entirely personal uniting these two songs I love in the happenstance of naming conventions—which, given the whole premise of this blog, is an unsurprisingly charming bonus for me (12,000 Songs turned a year old last week, so consider this the obligatory nod to that milestone). This is a snapshot compared to the earlier song’s perspective of the whole future opening up and inviting someone’s memory to stay; this is pure frenetic energy in the face of jarring calm unfolding in real time while “In My Life” is gentle waves of forever lapping at the shores of the present.

As just one thing unto itself, I absolutely love this song. I love that Lennon and McCartney wrote it the way they did, that mishmash of perspectives beautifully and almost tangibly emulating the sense of time’s subjective flexibility that comes with tripping one’s balls off and checking out for a while to get lost in the knots of a wooden wall panel or watching the trees sparkle as the minutes twist and meander into something much less defined and stretching toward the cosmos. The collisions beyond the literal lyrical one all are so real and as important to the narrative as every other one accompanying it and moving things along in the only order they were ever supposed to unfurl themselves.

It’s tough coming to The Beatles decades after almost anything worth saying about them has already been said and better, and it’s even tougher to be objective about their music when you’ve already seen the impact they’ve had, both culturally and within the pantheon of music. Aside from a childhood friend’s enduring obsession with “Yellow Submarine,” I didn’t really give them any thought until later in high school, as my love for Zeppelin abated just enough to yield to the classic-rock likes of early Pink Floyd and post-LSD Beatles and all these bands I think I needed a couple more years of learning how to appreciate music in general to, in fact, fully and retrospectively appreciate.

And there is nothing like taking stock of a new-to-you band’s finite oeuvre and realizing that at least it’s got days and miles of songs to dive into and explore. The nascent internet helped me cobble together a Best Way to Meet The Beatles tactic, which I tried so hard to believe in but was my first real experience with feeling like it’s okay to tell The Experts to fuck off into the sun and let me do this myself.

My introduction to the band that was bigger than Jesus was all the better for it. I spent a good year with The Beatles on heavy rotation until they, like so much other music of all kinds, were eclipsed by my deepening immersion in the emo and local scenes. Actively performing bands I could actually see and sing along to live were solidly the foundation of my musical diet by my senior year, but the classic rock, like all good and timeless things, never fully receded into the distance, always waiting to be a joy to revisit.