The story of John Lennon and Paul McCartney is a complicated one. Together, they formed arguably the greatest songwriting partnership of all time, making The Beatles the most significant rock band the world has ever seen. They pushed the established musical boundaries and beckoned culture into the bright light of the future with their words […]
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By the time John Lennon left The Beatles, he was completely burned out on being a rock and roll star. The allure of being the next Elvis Presley or Little Richard looked great back when he started, but when you listen to the kind of records that he was making on Plastic Ono Band, he […]
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I think I can say with some conviction that we are all fans of The Beatles. I vehemently refuse to believe that anybody on this earth hates every single one of their songs, for there is simply so much to choose from that the reality of that is something of an impossibility. But within the […]
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The invisible string theory is the idea that, in some way, somehow, we are already tethered to all the people who will be important to us in our lives. It’s the idea that an invisible thread already links us to people we haven’t met yet. These are people who, in a year or two, will […]
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“Father, you left me/ But I never left you/ I needed you, you didn’t need me,” John Lennon sings on ‘Mother’, his devastating take on his childhood. It was a rough one. Lennon’s father abandoned the family, came home randomly one day expecting it all to be fine, and then even attempted to kidnap his […]
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The room did not quiet because it was told to. It settled because it sensed something rare unfolding. As the last echoes faded, Sean Ono Lennon and Julian Lennon stood together onstage, allowing stillness to arrive on its own terms. The pause mattered. It created a space where listening could happen before words were spoken. […]
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Fear arrived before confidence ever had a chance. In August 1968, inside the offices of Apple Records, Mary Hopkinwaited, certain she did not belong. She was eighteen years old, newly discovered, carrying a voice that felt fragile in her own ears. Around her were names already etched into history. They were The Beatles. She was […]
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Double Fantasy was, of course, the swan song for John Lennon. He couldn’t have predicted what happened next, but he did have an odd prescience of knowing how things were meant to be. By this point in his life, he had experienced enough torment and tumult that when his children came along, it provided him […]
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The Beatles were Motown fanatics; there is no two ways around it. From the covers of songs like ‘Please Mister Postman’ and ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ to Paul McCartney’s appreciation of bassist James Jamerson, the early Beatles sound was at least partially, if not significantly, indebted to the sound coming out of […]
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When Keith Richards spoke about the main difference between The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, he was relatively straightforward with his answer. “I remember Keith Richards saying to me, ‘You had four singers. We only had one’,” said Paul McCartney, recalling the guitarist’s comments, “Little comments like that will set me off, and I think, […]
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