11 Solo Beatles Songs We'd Rather Die Than Live Without

"EVERY NIGHT" BY PAUL (LJ)

Paul is my favorite solo Beatle and McCartney is my favorite solo Paul. I love it because it’s shy. It reminds me of a little boy. 
        You could hear that McCartney is Paul’s first solo album even if you didn’t know it- it feels tentative, like he’s not completely sure if it’s what he’s supposed to be doing, like maybe he’s afraid he’s being bad by doing it. McCartney-Paul reminds me of a little boy climbing a forbidden fence and panicking halfway up, darting his head around to make sure no one’s watching. It sounds like an eight-year-old was given the homework assignment “Write a Paul McCartney album,” and now is standing in front of a classroom about to present it to his peers. He is wearing grey wool shorts and scratching the side of his shin with the heel of his brogue. He’s very nervous to sing, but when he finally opens his mouth, “Every Night” falls out. 
        I love McCartney for its imperfection; its scratchiness is becoming to Paul. It’s made of yarn and gluestick-stained construction paper, matchsticks, ribbon roses, pressed dry daisies- it’s a scrapbook. It’s a plaid patchwork scrapbook a little kid made, little Paul. I love every song on McCartney (except “Kreen-Akrore,” but who loves “Kreen-Akrore”? Probably only Paul, I bet), but I’ve chosen “Every Night” to be my McCartney flag-bearer because it’s the saddest, and sad Paul is my favorite.
         “Every Night” reminds you that Paul McCartney is an actual human; I usually think of him as more of a creature, an angel or an elf. But he’s not! He’s blood and bone, the Beatles broke up, he’s bumming hard, and he wrote “Every Night” about it. It makes you imagine poor sad-Paul schlumping around his cute farm in a bathrobe, letting his personal hygiene fall to shit, eating cereal and letting milk dribble down his gross black beard, being a jerk to Linda but not even that big of a jerk. My favorite’s when he sings Every day I lean a lamppost, I’m wasting my time- I can see him so clearly, Paul the lamppost-leaner: he’s wearing an overcoat and it’s overcast, his hair and eyes are black as coal against his pale face and hands, as if you turned his contrast way up.
        “Every Night”’s not the Northern lights, and it’s not the stars in the sky. It’s a sweet and simple song about sadness, and even though the sadness he’s describing is brought upon by dazzling and extreme circumstances that nobody who wasn’t a member of the band The Beatles could ever relate to, he does such a wonderful job of putting it in layman’s terms. He’s so careful about it, and it’s sweet of him. I think it’s really important to Paul McCartney that none of us ever listen to his songs and feel like our lives are lame compared to his, and I love that about Paul, the respect he has for his audience. I love Paul. Paul! What a wonderful thing that happened for the world, our getting Paul McCartney.

"ODE TO A KOALA BEAR" BY PAUL (LIZ)

When I'm six, my dad makes me a tape that's mostly Disney songs: "Oo-De-Lally" from Robin Hood, "Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo" from Cinderella, a disco version of the Mickey Mouse Club theme, that Fox and the Hound song about best friends, which makes me want to cry sometimes, because The Fox and the Hound was so sad! I'm so heartbroken for the fox and the hound; I wish I could make a movie where they get to be together forever.

          On the second side of the tape, after all the Disney stuff, there’s a song called “Say Say Say” by Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, whose video I've seen before on MTV. In "Say Say Say" Paul and Michael and Paul's wife Linda ride around the countryside, selling their magic potion that’s not really magic -- it's fake! They’re hucksters. But it's all right because they do good things too, like visit orphanages and put on magic shows for the kids. My favorite part's when they're in some ramshackle hotel and Paul and Michael are shaving and singing and Linda's watching them from the bed, laughing and playing her guitar. After that they go to a bar and shoot pool and Michael chases after a girl with feathers in her hair but it's weird because I think that girl is his sister. Then they dress up like clowns and do more magic tricks onstage in a music hall and Linda plays piano and her dress is very sexy and all the men go "Ooooh…" when she takes her coat off and lets it fall to the floor. They dance together, Paul and Michael, and Paul's playing the banjo and bobbing his neck like a silly chicken and then he changes his costume again, puts on a robe and a turban like Punjab in Annie. Then Paul sets a big garbage can on fire and Linda yells "Fire!" and they all run out of the building and Michael's sister runs after them and Paul gives her a bunch of flowers. And Paul and Linda and Michael all ride off in the back of their truck, into the sunset, Paul and Linda holding hands. It's so cool and romantic, their wild life together.

One day after my dad makes me the tape with Disney songs and "Say Say Say," we take the bus to Strawberries downtown to look at records. I'm flipping through the 45s and I find one for "Say Say Say" and there's another song on the B side and I ask my dad to buy it for me.

         "But you already have that song," my dad says.

         "But there's another song on the back!" I whine and shout, shoving the record up toward his face. I'm anxious and adamant and so curious about the B-side, which is a song called "Ode to a Koala Bear." I've never heard a song about a koala before -- I didn't even know koalas were something you could sing about.

         So my dad buys me the 45 and we get back on the bus and he brings me home to where my mom and I live. In my bedroom I slide the 45 out of its sleeve and play "Say Say Say" and sit on my canopy bed and dance my shoulders around just like I'm Linda. I play it a few more times before I flip the record over, to the song about the koala. 

        "Ode to a Koala Bear" sounds old-fashioned, like a song you'd hear in a movie where teenagers hang out in diners and drink milkshakes and the girls wear short-sleeved fuzzy sweaters and saddle shoes. Paul seems sad and happy at the same time, like he loves the koala bear so much -- maybe too much. The song makes me sad and happy too, hurts my heart like at the end of The Fox and the Hound even though there's nothing bad happening at all: it's just Paul being sweet, sweeter than ever, sweeter than the piece of pink chocolate that's always the last left in the Russell Stover's box when the good candy’s all gone on Christmas afternoon. That's the sweetest thing I can think of, that pink chocolate I usually end up spitting out after gnawing a while and letting the milky pinkness sink into my tongue and turn my stomach queasy. Paul’s making my stomach a little queasy now too but I like it, I like my throat feeling full like I might have to cry just from listening to a song.

          It's my first time feeling that way and I'll end up feeling it at least a million more times, but never as pure or pink as with Paul and the koala.

"UNCLE ALBERT/ADMIRAL HALSEY" BY PAUL (LJ)

“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” is like a Kinks song, like Arthur by the Kinks, but with a different sky. The sky in the Arthur world, the Ray Davies world, is eternally slate grey, branded with a pitchfork of the kind of lightning that kills you. Probably half the characters in Kinks songs get struck to death by lightning a few months after the song ends. 
        The “Uncle Albert” sky, the Paul McCartney sky, is sherbety light orange and electric pink. Paul McCartney writes stories about people who live in a sweeter, better world than I do, which used to really irritate me- I prefer a darker sky. But you can’t blame Paul for writing songs that take place in a perfect world, because as far as Paul McCartney knows, the world is perfect. Because Paul McCartney has lived a perfect life. 
        Paul got rich and famous as a boy and it never bothered him, he liked it. He likes fame. He’s good at being famous. He’s level-headed, his soul is 0% tortured, he’s a naturally happy guy, and that’s his life. He was the cute one in the Beatles and he enjoyed it, he was sad for five minutes when the Beatles broke up, fell in love and wrote “Every Night” and then moved on and put his wife in his new oddly-named band Wings, wrote a James Bond theme song, kept his fame momentum going, lived on a farm, had a bunch of kids, was a really awesome dad I bet, made more money, stayed relevant, stayed beloved, and became an animal rights activist. Linda McCartney died and he married Heather Mills and that was probably the worst thing that ever happened to him but he’s Paul McCartney so he just kept on trucking and released a hundred new albums and then the Beatles were on iTunes and he married Nancy Shevell and played at the London Olympics and now it’s today and he’s most likely just chillin' in a chill mansion in his cute Converse All-Stars, keepin’ it young, or maybe sleeping very soundly. It’s not Paul’s fault that he can’t comprehend the shittiness of the rest of our lives! He has no reason to think about how hard it must suck to be broke and single and questioning the fanciful decision you made to pursue your dumb dream of being a writer- and why should he? I’m happy for anyone in the world who doesn’t have to think about that. 
        I’m happy for Paul McCartney. I’m happy that music worked out for him, and I’m happy I get to listen to his electric sherbet-skied songs when I’m too tired to think about oppression, Ray Davies. Oppression and bureaucrats and conditioning. What’s “Uncle Albert” about, even? I can’t tell. “British happiness,” maybe? 
        British happiness- like regular happiness, only lovelier, because it’s British. 
        In England, in sweet pretty Paul England, you don’t cry- you "believe you’re going to rain.” I like that, I like to imagine myself talking like that. We trashy North Americans would never say we “believe” we’re going to do anything, we'd just say we’re gonna do it. And we’d never say we’d never done a “bloody” thing, we’d say a “fucking.” A “fucking” thing. And how adorable that the lyric “Hands across the water/Heads across the sky” was written by a thirty year old man, the only thirty year old man who could think to write those words which always make me think of the way children draw the ocean- cocked blue lines, with a half-hidden sun at the upper lefthand corner of the landscaped sheet of printer paper, a sun wearing sunglasses, his smile a bracket reclining. 
        I wish I’d had this song when I was a kid, when I drew the sun like that. 

"MONKBERRY MOON DELIGHT" BY PAUL (LIZ)

Six springtimes ago at a mineral-springs resort in the Sonoran Desert there was a night when a very dashing longhaired man fed me lots of chardonnay and asked me weird questions about astrology and then we ate chocolate cake and went nightswimming in a grotto whose water was naturally infused with lithium and as we swam we smoked cigars and smoked marijuana and talked about rock and roll and the cosmos and at some point he told me I was a powerful butterfly and I'm sure I blushed with my whole body.

          The point of the story is that the dashing longhaired man was marriage-related to Paul McCartney, by way of his wife, who was also there in the grotto with us (I KNOW, RIGHT??? SIGH). While we swam they told cool stories about Paul and about John and I pretended not to be impressed although of course I'd never been so impressed by anything else in my entire life. We stayed up swimming a long time and I fell in love with that man a little bit, and I loved his wife a lot too. Early the next morning, I ran into him while taking one last swim before leaving the resort aka seventh heaven.

          "I'll see you around again someday, somewhere," he said, waving his arm mysteriously, perhaps indicating that "somewhere" could mean anywhere in the universe.

          "Okay," I said, and probably blushed again.

          I went back home to L.A. and thought about Paul McCartney so much, for the first time since I was very little and had my whole "Ode to a Koala Bear" obsession and made my mom take me to see Give My Regards To Broad Street, which I bet was absolutely terrible. I bought a copy of Ram and played it all the time, and the first song I fell for was "Monkberry Moon Delight." I'm guessing that's the one lots of people glom onto first: it's catchy as hell, the guitar's kinda sinister and wild, but the lyrics are about bananas and pajamas and cats and kittens. It's this cool swirling-together of rough and dreamy, and apparently a monkberry moon delight is a "fantasy milkshake," according to Paul.

          I wish more songs were fantasy milkshakes. I wish life were a fantasy milkshake, but I also don't wish that, because then we wouldn't need Paul McCartney to make fantasy milkshakes for us. And a world where Paul McCartney is superfluous, that's not any sort of world I'd ever want to live in.

"GET ON THE RIGHT THING" BY PAUL (LJ)

(Once, a long time ago, I sat on a white bench with a dude I was in love with and asked him which Beatle he’d be, and he said some stupid thing I didn’t agree with. He asked me the same question and I told him, “I’m a John who aspires to be a Paul.” After some time passed and our relationship collapsed, I became disgusted by my having said that. “How could I ever have claimed I want to be a Paul?” I wondered, and concluded: “I was being diffident. I made myself a mute around him. I was afraid he couldn’t handle my being a John, so I wanted to dull myself down and convince him that I’m pleasant. It was pure subservience.”
        But it wasn’t. I told that man I aspired to be a Paul because I aspired to be happy.) 

Ew, John solo is so sub-par. It's flat and brown and boring. If John Lennon solo records were made by some other guy, I wouldn’t like that guy’s music. I’d have listened to Plastic Ono Band once, shrugged, and then dismissed the rest of his catalogue. “It’s nasty,” I'd say, “That singer bums me out. He just seems like… I’d hate hanging out with him. He’s such a sad and nasty guy.”
        John Lennon solo reminds me of having a friend who’s “in a really bad place right now,” and is being a total dickhead about it. At first you’re overly forgiving- you remember all the great times and larks you and John have had over the years, so you give him the benefit of the doubt. You’re like, “John’s strong. He’s great. He’ll totally come out the other side,” but he doesn’t. He just becomes bigger and bigger of a dickhead, yet you continue putting up with it, because it’s impossible for you to believe that the fantastic human being with whom you’ve shared so many fond memories could possibly just be this now, this crappy dickhead who treats you like shit, and then eventually you hit your boiling point and start ignoring John’s text messages and then John’s all “What the fuck? I thought you were my friend,” so you talk to your therapist about your fucked up relationship with your shitty friend John and your therapist tells you “John is a negative person in your life; you deserve better than that,” and you’re like “Yeah! That’s so true about me!” and then you spend five hours writing John this legendarily brilliant email explaining exactly how you feel and John maybe says one asshole-y comment in response but you're not too torn up about it, he deserves to, and otherwise he gets the message and you’re free of John and it’s a giant load off your shoulders. “Wow, that was such a great decision!” you think, and then a year later you run into John on the street and you are cordial and for like five seconds you think maybe you should start being friends with John again but you're so wise and really quick you see what a dumb idea that’d be, but it’s not any big deal or terrible thing, and when you get home that night he pops back into your head and you realize you wish him the best. You really do. 

 __ 

I initially wrote that as the intro to a thing I never wrote about “Gimme Some Truth” by John Lennon being one of the Top 5 Solo Beatles Songs I’d Rather Die Than Live Without, but then I realized I’d kinda rather die than live with “Gimme Some Truth.”
        I wanted to keep it in here because it’s meant a lot of things to me over the course of my life, and I wanted to pay homage to what it once felt like to run down a wet black March street listening to John sing his creaky nasty words and believe that what was compulsion was cosmic, that my destiny was to write down all the dirtiest truest shit of life using the ugliest words I could. It felt good in the way that when you’re angry feeling bad feels best. You believe in bad.
        Now when I listen to “Gimme Some Truth” I can’t make it past the first twenty seconds. It’s so loud and sounds like a winding clock breaking while unwinding. I take the subway to work for 6 PM and the train is packed with all sweating bankers and assholes commuting and when the train goes aboveground at Davisville everybody busts out their iPads and starts doing God knows what until their fingers break and like fuck I'm into my iPhone too but seriously, I think you can live those thirty seconds just existing as a human person without a screen to touch, it’s stupider than it is tragic and the last thing the me watching the iPad people needs is for my ears to be hearing is some mean man yelling about what the truth is when he so clearly had no fucking idea! 

I fell in love with “Get On The Right Thing” about a week ago and I am committing to the opinions of myself about a week ago, because I think the person I am right now is right. “Get On The Right Thing” is kicky and positive and instead of making me think about how much I hate all the iPad-y losers on the subway it gets me all jazzed for the rest of my life I’ll spend not being them. I'm the right thing, and when Paul McCartney tells me that I knew it all along, I think, “Well there’s another thing that Paul McCartney was right about!” and when he asks me to believe him, I do. 
         I don’t believe John Lennon when he screams all over my life about how I need to give him some truth. He's a knife but he's a butter knife, too dull to cut through me. I’m pretty sure he’s just some rich dude lashing out at whoever he can because he can, and I’m sorry John Lennon, but I can’t. 
        I can’t stand by a person when I know that he is wrong. And maybe once upon a time I told someone a lie because I thought that what I wanted was to be happy, but I don’t. What I want is to be right.

"CHECK MY MACHINE" BY PAUL (JEN)  

Laura and I (different Laura, my life is filled with important Lauras) were making pizza and arguing with Alan about Paul McCartney. He was saying Paul is the coolest Beatle. That’s just not true, OK? Paul is many amazing things but he is just not the coolest Beatle. Alan doesn’t even care about the Beatles so this faux argument doesn’t even have any weight. It’s like, nothing. No. 
         To prove his point, Alan put on McCartney II which he hadn’t even listened to at this point. When "Temporary Secretary" came on all of our heads exploded. Laura & I instantly had a future band called Temporary Secretary, which rules or will rule. By the time we reached "Check My Machine" my life as I knew it was over and all I cared about was McCartney II. Just look at the album cover - It’s perfect. 
        "Check My Machine" (ok all of McCartney II) is a stoned out of his mind Paul McCartney having fun, experimenting with synthesizers, exploring and grooving. It's beautiful. He’s also literally checking the machine he was using to record. The lyrics to "Check My Machine" are “Check my machine”. Do you like- no, LOVE- repetition? Stoned Paul does, and I do too. 

"SMILE AWAY" BY PAUL (LIZ)

One night when I was 25 and living at my parents' house for the summer, I came home from work a little before dusk and was immediately greeted by some weirdo teenager going door-to-door down our street and trying to sell magazine subscriptions. She gave me her whole spiel about raising money to go to college or whatever the fuck, and I listened patiently, because mostly I'm pretty nice.

           A few minutes into the conversation, the girl paused and flashed me the killerest smile.

          "Ask me why I'm smilin'!" she demanded.

          "Why are you smilin'?" I asked her.

          "I'm smilin' 'cause you're stylin'!" said the girl, rapturous.

          "Oh, cool," I replied. "Thanks so much."

          Then the girl went on explaining about the magazine subscriptions and all the fantastic discounts in store for me, should I choose to get on board. I listened patiently some more and then ordered a subscription to Spin, since mine had lapsed a few months before.

           "Ask me why I'm grinnin'!" said the girl after I'd filled out my order card.

           "Why are you grinnin'?" I asked.

           "I'm grinnin' 'cause I'm winnin'!" the girl told me, grinnin' still. I congratulated her, she thanked me for my time, and the two of us went our separate ways forever.

Three or four times out of ten, I think of the smilin'/stylin'/grinnin'/winnin' girl when I'm listening to "Smile Away" by Paul and Linda McCartney. I'm someone who smiles a lot, and I like the idea of smiles and style being inextricably connected. A few years ago I went through a phase of listening to "Smile Away" all the time and feeling judgy and superior to the non-smilers, the joy-killers, the kind of people whom Ringo might warn You want to stop being so scornful, it's twisting your face. That's kind of an aggro way to get high on smiling, but "Smile Away" isn't aggro at all. It's goofy and bluesy, a bluesy little goof, it's so cute how Paul hoots and hollers at the end. Paul loves smiles so much! Smiles are for the dazzling and triumphant. I hope the smilin'/stylin'/grinnin'/winnin' got everything she ever dreamed of.

"NOBODY TOLD ME" BY JOHN (LIZ)

Once upon a time in the Hollywood Hills, on a night when I was drinking white wine out of a plastic cup and wearing a really good Rolling Stones shirt and eating Twizzlers flavored like Starburst, I asked someone a stupid question and got a very terrible answer. It was a question about a person I'd once cared for, and the answer made me think that maybe said person might be slightly rotten, and I bugged out and crumbled and felt really bad about falling for someone who possibly wasn't so wonderful. I allowed myself a quick and quiet little meltdown and then I got my shit back together, changed into my bathing suit and went swimming in a pool whose water was heated and gorgeous and kinda velvety. It wasn't a hundredth as good as my lithium-nightswimming-with-the-McCartney's experience, but it was therapeutic; the swim both pacified and fortified me. Soon after I got out of the water, we left the party and drove back home to Echo Park.

          At home my housemate put on a John Lennon record and made some nice comment about loving John Lennon for loving the hell out of Yoko Ono, and then he gave me this postcard. I also love that John Lennon loved the hell out of Yoko Ono, and I love that Yoko Ono loved the hell out of John Lennon. In general I love it when people love the hell out of each other: I think it's so courageous. I'd like to be more courageous. I'd like other people to be more courageous as well.

I was going to write "Nobody Told Me" about watching the video for "Nobody Told Me" when I was a very little girl, about my dad explaining to me who John Lennon was and what he meant to the world and how he died, about how strange it is that I'm old enough to have been alive at the same time as John Lennon but too young to have ever been aware of John Lennon before he was dead, about how I love the moments in the video when John's not wearing glasses and you can really see the boy/Beatle in his face in a way that's rare for latter-day John, about how the lyrics have always seemed so spooky and prescient to me, even when I had no idea what the word "prescient" might mean.

          But instead all I really want to write about is the part in the video (1:45 to 1:53) when John's wearing his white suit and doing his weird dance, holding hands with Yoko and flitting all around. I used to hate that part when I was little -- I thought John looked like such a creep. Now when I listen to "Nobody Told Me," John's doing that dance in my head for almost the entire song. It's still creepy but it's joyful, and the creepiness intensifies the joyfulness, and vice-a-versa. I don't understand John and Yoko but I'm always undone by their dancing (see also: their "I Me Mine" waltz in Let It Be). They're just their own little world, and fuck everybody else. I don't care if it's childish, I think that's so romantic and wonderful.

"COSMICALLY CONSCIOUS" BY PAUL (LIZ)

Last week "Cosmically Conscious" came up on my iPod shuffle so many times and I thought a lot about light, about how the best thing you can probably do in your day-to-day walking-around is emit light and reflect light and throw light all over everybody else. "Cosmically Conscious" is seven zillion watts of light and it's also a prism that sends rainbows everywhere and the orange and the purple of the rainbows are so oversaturated and happy. The prism's probably shaped like a heart or a puppy, or maybe just a great big chunky diamond or a star.

          Also last week I started painting my nails shiny-gold and when I'm writing I can see the gold reflected in my laptop screen and it's just so fun and hypnotizing.

 "BEWARE OF DARKNESS (DEMO)" BY GEORGE (LJ)

 George Harrison is a cracking square of brown leather and he is the season autumn. He is the color palette burgundy/dull orange/army green/goldenrod. We are sitting cross-legged and facing each other in a room made of wood. A little bowl of blackberry yogurt mixed with sunflower seeds sits between us. I’m wearing a crown made of dandelions, and I’m frowning.
        There are two cats in the room: one black, and one Siamese. One is wandering, and the other’s yawning. They are sleepy and slow. The air is still. The window is open only a crack and the breeze would be too sharp if it were open any wider but we’ve figured out the perfect amount of sky for us to touch, George Harrison and I, and it’s such a wonderful temperature, a temperature that disappears into itself. There’s no hot or cold in the room. 
        At first I think there’s no happy or sad in the room and I’m relishing existing in such an emotionally neutral place but when George starts to strum his guitar and play this song I realize that there’s so much of both very happy and very sad everywhere but because it’s George here, because I'm with George, what’s happening is that happy and sad are balancing out. So it feels like nothing, but that nothing is an illusion, and it’s my favorite feeling I’ve ever felt. I never believed I could have it but I could have it. It’s this song. 
        “What’s a soft-shoe shuffler, George?” I ask George, but he doesn’t answer- he just shrugs a tiny shrug, barely smiles. “I know what a falling swinger is, though,” I say, to impress him maybe, and he still doesn’t say anything, which is embarrassing. I guess it’s pretty rude for me to keep interrupting him while he’s being so kind as to sit here and sing me this song, but I can’t help myself-“Are you saying that sadness can hit you, or that sadness can hate you?” I ask. 
        “Hit you.” 
         “I like hate,” I say, “I’m going to change it to hate, in my head. I like that idea, of sadness hating me. I feel like I could really do something with that, like, whenever I’m sad, I can just tell myself, it’s, like, the emotional equivalent of an enemy trying to, like, trick me-” 
        “Sadness doesn’t hate you,” says George. 
         “You know what I hate about life?” I ask nobody, “I hate how someone’s always trying to teach you a fucking lesson all the time.” 
         “Don’t be nasty,” he says, and I start to tell him “I didn’t mean you!” but he puts a finger to his lips and shushes me. He finishes the song, and I start to cry a bit, because it’s beautiful. 
         “As long as you’re playing that song, everything will always be okay,” I tell him. 
          “That’s not true,” he says, and he’s right.

George Harrison is the only person I’ll ever let let teach me a lesson. There is chocolate for dessert.

"THE BALLAD OF SIR FRANKIE CRISP (LET IT ROLL)" BY GEORGE (LJ)

I thought of a few nice things to say that sort of began to crack the surface of how much this song means to me. I thought to say that this song is the beginning of September. It's the first time of the season you feel that smoky breeze which means it's fall now. 
        I thought to say that from the first time I heard it it felt as much a part of me as my mother's laugh or how in certain photographs I can see my father in my face. I knew this song before I knew this song. 
       And I wanted to say about "Let it Roll," to explain "Let it Roll," that I've never been very good at letting it be. It's too boring, and it embraces stasis, which I don't think is a very intelligent way for any human to live. And I try to let things go, but it always feels like pulling out a loose tooth that isn't ready to leave, attached by microscopic tendons yelling "NO- I don't want to stop being part of the story." 
        "Let it roll" is stability and progression in one. It allows you to live in the present tense while simultaneously acknowledging an inevitable future; it reminds you that the present was once the future and the future will one day be the present. George was the most tender fatalist. 
         And roll, I love roll- there's a part in Keith Richards' book where he says "Mick's the rock and I'm the roll," and I loved that, I love rolling. It sounds so easy, so chill. I love using rolled in a sentence like "Laura Jane rolled on in at 6:15 PM" and I love in "I'd Have You Anytime" when he sings Let me roll it to you, and I love thinking about how into roll George Harrison was when he was making All Things Must Pass. It must have meant so much to him, for him to put it in two whole songs. He wanted to teach us roll and it worked on me. He taught me roll. 

So those are some things I have to say about "The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp" by George Harrison but there is something else of it that I don't know how to say, that words aren't big enough to tell. I was walking down the kind of slim dirt path that has been worn into the earth by all us excellent humans who prefer to walk on grass over a sidewalk when I realized there was only one way to explain it- to myself, or to anyone- and so I did.

Thank you, George. For this song, for India, and for everything.