I don't think I could have ended this playlist any other way.
I don't actually listen to a lot of Beatles music these days, but that's because I've already got their albums in my bones and can just call songs to mind with crystal clarity. Thanks to my parents being Beatles superfans, I've had every verse and chorus imprinted on my memory the way others know their scripture or their Shakespeare backward and forward. I remember the posters of their famous psychedelic portraits that hung in our living room, and I'm still in awe that my parents got to see them when they played Rizal Stadium in 1966—their last overseas concert before they quit touring forever. "Let It Be" and "Hey Jude" were among the first tunes I taught myself to play on the piano. Beatles songs are still my go-to reference points when processing new music, and I'm always delighted to hear homages in unexpected places (see if you can catch the echoes of "Here, There and Everywhere" in Frank Ocean's "White Ferrari").
On the last morning of our family trip to London years ago, we made a pilgrimage to Abbey Road Studios. I walked on the iconic crossing as my daughter took my photo. (I'd never been so thrilled and elated just to cross a street.) Afterwards I stood in front of the outer wall of the studio complex—nearly every inch of it covered in scrawled messages from Beatles fans. Naturally I had to leave my mark too. And I wrote the one thing I knew I had to write:
And in the end the love you take
Is equal to the love you make
Those lines, of course, are from "The End," part of the closing medley on the Abbey Road album, along with "Golden Slumbers" and "Carry That Weight"—which, together, make up my final Song of the Day.
No matter how long I've lived with this music, it still offers up surprises; it was just recently that I learned that the lyrics to "Golden Slumbers" were adapted from Thomas Dekker's 1603 poem "Cradle Song." And as timeless as it is, the medley seems suited to the moment. "Golden Slumbers" offers both comfort for tears and the poignant realization that you can't go back to the way things were. "Carry That Weight" evokes a heavy burden to bear, as we reckon with our generational sins and fight for a just future. "The End" opens with a massive drum solo and blistering guitars—the music of joy or rage or revolution, take your pick—and closes with a couplet about karma: clichéd, perhaps, but as we're seeing everyday, profoundly true after all. We reap what we sow, and what goes around comes around. Let's make sure that what goes around is love.
A note on videos: Incredibly, YouTube doesn't seem to have any videos of the entire medley as recorded on the album (though the official Beatles channel has separate videos for the three component songs). The clip above is from the site Vimeo—it's slightly muffled and distorted, but I'm charmed by how it reminds me of the way I used to hear the music on Dad's mixtapes. For clearer audio (but with the songs annoyingly separated by split-second pauses), check out this alternate clip. For the YouTube playlist, I'm including a live performance by Paul McCartney instead. (And check out this astonishingly meticulous note-for-note recreation by the Dutch band the Analogues.)
And that concludes the Songs for Sheltering project! Thank you so much for coming with me on this journey—two and a half months of writing about 67 songs (give or take a few "twofer" entries). The complete playlist is now nearly 5 hours long, and I hope it continues to give you pleasure if you decide to replay it, whether in whole or in part. Thank you for the encouragement, the kind words, and your own recommendations; I've discovered some wonderful new music that way. And since replying has never been a requirement or expectation, thank you to everyone just for reading—for being a willing audience as I attempted this whatever-it-is of a project: part amateur music criticism, part fanboy gushing, part political commentary, part biographical self-excavation. I hope you got something out of it! Here's what I got out of it: At the beginning of this process, I wasn't sure that I could stick to a daily practice of thinking and writing, and having something to say. Now that it's done, the biggest thing I've learned about myself is that I can. That is huge for me, more than I can say in this post. And I hope to carry that knowledge with me into other writing projects in the future. The world is still the world out there. As we face whatever comes next, I wish you courage, solace, hope, joy, and love. And music, always.
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Listen to the Spotify playlist here.
Watch the YouTube playlist here.