Two Beatles paragraphs

Saturday 7/20/24

McCartney wrote songs that resound after the fact as part of a progression. We can hear what predated them in his own journey as a writer and what eventually followed. There’s discernible lineage, the same as when you go to the genealogical society and trace where you’ve come from so as to get a glimpse of where you might be heading, in some form or other.

Lennon songs are often not this way. They’re one-offs. They have no precedent nor progeny. They are themselves and nothing more, which is itself a form of everything. Self-contained essentiality. Having realized one of his in-house, single-unit creations, Lennon moves on to whatever is next for him. At his best—from spring 1964 to autumn 1965—the duration of those intervals between these compositions was briefer than they would later be. He required a certain kind of inspiration—that which was elsewhere, including buried deep down—to come to him, whereas McCartney could decide to get on with it, as a worker punches the clock. Different approaches, different bodies of work within the one body of work, and as near as we get to an ideal pairing of writers in the medium.    

That's just from something I'm writing at the moment. But there is more substance, depth, insight, and value in those two paragraphs than in what anyone else has produced in a lifetime of Beatles writings.