I love other people’s songs. How much they’ve taught me about being human—how to think about myself and others. And, most important, how they absorb our experiences and store our memories.
No matter how many people hear the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” there’s only one version that belongs to you. Our appraisals might align, but I doubt your version includes a memory of waiting for the doors to open at an all-ages Jodie Foster’s Army concert on Laclede’s Landing, in St. Louis, as a flooding Mississippi River rages down Wharf Street and heaves up onto the steps of the Gateway Arch. Your mind melting down on mushrooms, watching a husband-and-wife street-performing duo sing “A Day in the Life” while their toddler does laps around you keeping shockingly good time on a tambourine.
It’d be cool if we could see the worlds within the songs inside one another’s heads. But I also love how impenetrable it all is. I love that what’s mine can’t be yours, and we still get to call it ours. Songs are the best way I know to make peace with our lack of a shared consciousness.
When I sat down to write a book about other people’s songs, these are some of the ones that came to mind first. For me, each of them is a miracle.
“Both Sides, Now,” by Joni Mitchell
There are some songs so perfect, it’s impossible to imagine them ever not existing. Melodies so seamless that contemplating how they were constructed makes no sense. Miniature suns and moons. Here long before us, and sure to survive long after we’re gone. Music that arrives not as something new but as something that finally has a name. This song feels like it’s been a part of me for as long as I’ve had a me to feel.
I must have heard it as an infant. Judy Collins’s version was riding high on the charts shortly after my first birthday, so it probably seeped into my consciousness right when the language centers in my brain were kicking into gear. If that’s the explanation for the feeling I have that this song is purely a geological fact, then lucky me. What a gift it’s been to have this song on speed dial my entire life. It almost feels like it has a specific physical presence, like a grade-school locker-lined hallway. Or maybe it’s more like a loved one’s face—like how I can close my eyes and see my sister as a young woman getting married, then, later, smiling beneath silver-gray bangs. Like how both of those images are my sister to me.
It’s love that I’m describing, isn’t it? I trust this song so much. Its wisdom, lyrically, is astonishing. And as simple as it may sound, “Something’s lost, but something’s gained / In living every day,” when combined with such an indelible melody, is a remarkable bit of consolation to have coming out of your radio and, in turn, on a loop in your head for more than 50 years.
Joni Mitchell was barely out of her teens when she wrote this song. Pure magic. Pure genius.
If you somehow aren’t familiar with it, please go listen now if you can. If it doesn’t keep you company for a long time, I hope you have a song that feels to you the way I’ve described this one. I’d be lost without it.
So it’s a good thing it can’t be taken away from me, not even if I never hear it again. It is a part of the world I live in. Like air and water.
“Balancing Act,” by Volcano Suns
When you’re an angsty kid, you’re an easy mark for angsty songs. It’s hard to avoid the very specific, painfully earnest spectacle of asking a parent or a love interest or a pet to sit down and listen to a record that expresses “exactly” how you feel.
During my teenage years, these embarrassing scenes mostly played out at our yellow Formica kitchen table, my mom squinting at me through cigarette smoke, speakers aimed down the stairs from my attic bedroom, my gaze averted as I mouthed the words, occasionally lifting my eyes toward my mother’s patient and neutral face, trying to gauge whether or not she was “getting it.”
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why describing this tableau still fills me with something approaching shame. Maybe I’m still worried about revealing the degree to which I was emotionally dependent on my mom. Or maybe I still feel a sense of guilt about the level of indulgence and support I got at home. (Even back then, I knew how rare that can be.) It’s like the urge to conceal an extravagant gift around friends who are just scraping by.
Whenever I think of this song, it feels frozen in the amber of my youth. Suspended in the air around a mother trying to understand her sad son. Her head cocked sincerely. Nodding and tearing up at the tears running down his cheeks.
How should I act in a crowd?
Should I voice my feelings
For acquaintances?
Should I feel lucky to be a part of the wheeling and dealing no matter what is said?
. . . It matters, it matters, it matters to me!
“(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” by Otis Redding
Would I play this song for you to make the case that Otis Redding is the best soul singer of all time? No. I would probably play you a live version of “Try a Little Tenderness.” But is this the most immediately welcoming recording I’ve ever heard? Yes, I believe it is.
It’s a flawless song, effortless in its execution. Music that understands itself completely, that betrays no need or desire to impress beyond its own immaculately drawn conclusions. Saying clearly: Here are the waves. Listen. This is where we will be for the next two minutes and 47 seconds.
It’s like getting to hear a song write itself. The music seems to conjure the words being sung. To me, that’s the most magical type of song. Even coming out of a cheap car radio, it has the ability to wrap its world around the listener. Your ears see it. To hear it is to be inside it. I am this song. You are this song.
This is a song that can transport us, take us away from our troubles, allow us a moment free of care. This is the song that whispered in my ear what I should aspire toward. And when you hear the occasional whistled refrain in my songs, you should know that it’s only there because Otis let me sit down on the dock beside him long enough to remember this: Thinking a lot can’t really fix a whole hell of a lot. Sometimes you’re better off whistling along with the waves for a while.
Anything by the Beatles
This is the only band I’m going to write about without picking a single song. And you know why, don’t you? Because it’s impossible.
All you need to do to understand the universal appeal of the Beatles is find yourself in the same room as a kid (infant on up) hearing them for the first time. Like how my wife and I managed to keep my son Spencer away from sugar, until we broke down on his first birthday and bought him a cake. One second after a single molecule of chocolate icing reached his tongue, his face got a look that we had never seen before—a look I can only describe as possessed, but possession by way of some cute version of Satan, or maybe the “Trix are for kids” rabbit. We sat paralyzed by his expression as he immediately lunged for the cake and hugged it to his chest. You know … like with the Beatles.
Having the Beatles in the world can feel pretty daunting for a musician. Everyone doing what I do knows that the world already has the Beatles. It’s incredibly unlikely that any of us will get anywhere close to their kind of impact. But that doesn’t deter us. Far from it. The Beatles are a shining beacon for every musician to steer toward. They built something whose scale is unattainable for us mortals, but they invited us all into their sandbox—to build with their sand. They encouraged us to think in new shapes.
One of the most pivotal moments in my life as a musician was when The Beatles Anthology came out, in 1995. At the time, there was little out there to suggest anything other than polished, visionary record-making from the Beatles. I suspected and craved confirmation that they had to have sounded human (bad, or at least not perfect) at some point in the process of album-making. So when this collection of demos, early takes, rough mixes, and outtakes was released, I felt like I’d been handed a treasure map. A schematic of love, clear and readable enough to reverse engineer any type of tune. Did “Strawberry Fields” always sound like music made by an underwater candy orchestra? Why, no. Here you can listen to it how it was written: like a normal song strummed on an acoustic guitar. What about “Helter Skelter”? Those proto-metal, quantum-leap guitar onslaughts must have been born fully formed, a lightning strike. Right? Nope. Just a tepid blues trudge here. Fascinating nevertheless, because you know they’re onto something, even if they don’t quite sound like they’ll ever get there.
It’s hard to overstate how important it was to know that even the Beatles struggled, made wrong turns, changed course, and ultimately surrendered to each unsure moment as an invitation. These records gave me permission to sound bad before I sounded good. Bad with gusto, wonder, and joy. No one looks inside and discovers only diamonds and pearls. If art is an act of discovery, you might as well learn how to enjoy getting lost.
This article has been adapted from Jeff Tweedy’s new book, World Within a Song.
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