In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs

by Andrew Blauner Narrated by Tandy Cronyn, Richard Poe, Eva Kaminsky, John Keating, Kevin R. Free

Overview

For readers who loved Tune In, an anthology of essays from thirty luminaries about their favorite Beatles songs. Blauner anthologizes essays from 30 authors, actors, and musicians reflecting on their favorite Beatles songs, creating a monument to the enduring impact of the most popular band of all time. The diversity of favorite tracks and the variety of reasons contributors love them speak to the range of the Beatles' song catalog and the power their music still has more than fifty years after they arrived in the United States. The essays explore life at its many stages, from optimistic youth to spiritual awakening to mid-life crises, and how the Beatles' music can be a lifelong soundtrack. Whether readers remember the Beatles' music as a solace in times of trouble or as a celebration, in their lives, they've loved them all.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Peter Keepnews

My favorite pieces are the ones, like Rick Moody's on the medley that ends Abbey Road, that combine the personal…with the musical…In Their Lives is full of pleasant surprises.

Publishers Weekly

02/27/2017
More than 50 years after the Beatles conquered America and unleashed Beatlemania upon the world, the Fab Four still exert an influence on popular music that even ex-Beatle Paul McCartney finds “astounding.” As in his previous collections, such as The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages, Blauner asks a range of writers to examine famous works; here, he requeststhe stories of their favorite Beatles songs, including “what the songs mean to them, the how and why of it all.” The 29 essays by artists such as Rosanne Cash, Rick Moody, and Jane Smiley are arranged chronologically by the songs’ release dates, so the collection serves as a miniature history of the Beatles. The author selection is somewhat arbitrary, but the authors all clearly care about the influence of the songs on their lives, and the essays are uniformly excellent and informative. Most fascinating is how often the authors address childhood and aging; cartoonist Roz Chast writes, “When I think about ‘She Loves You’... and how happy it made me feel to hear it, I think about how much it represented the mirage of a possible future.” This theme is echoed by novelist and music writer Bill Flanigan discussing “Two of Us” from the Beatles’ final album: “They showed us the way to go out into the world and get lost and they showed us the way to get back home.” (May)This review has been corrected to fix a typo in a contributor's name.

From the Publisher

In Their Lives is full of pleasant surprises.”—New York Times

“So many of us learned the basics from the Beatles: how to listen, what longing feels like, the pleasure of loving and thinking about art. Here a stunning array of writers shares how that process worked in childhood and youth, and still works within memory and cultural history. Some first-rate music criticism's in here, too.”
—Ann Powers, critic for NPR Music, author of Weird Like Us
 
“Sharp, witty, incisive, revealing.  I must have read millions of words on the Beatles, but there is always room and scope and desire to write even more as every generation discovers them. The writing, all the way through is, terrific. I enjoyed In Their Lives—and learned some new things about the ever-lasting appeal of the Beatles and their music.”
—Hunter Davies, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Beatles

“How lovely to have gifted writers put into words what I’ve been struggling to express for fifty years. The essays are as heartfelt and high-spirited as the songs themselves.  As the Beatles would say, ‘I was gobsmacked!’”
—Bob Spitz, author of The Beatles: The Biography 

“The Beatles—their music, their style—had an atomic effect on the old romantic traditions of the West, and Western civilization. hasn't been the same since. Here and now some of our best modern writers tell their fascinating stories of what the Beatles meant to them, and to those whom they loved, and everything rings so true. Yeah Yeah Yeah!”
—Stephen Davis, author of Hammer of the Gods and Jim Morrison

“A perceptive, heartfelt collection. Though the anthology is tinged with affection, it's no mere love letter to the group. [In Their Lives is] bound to appeal to serious Beatles aficionados, longtime followers of the group seeking a nostalgic walk down ‘Penny Lane,’ and casual music fans.”
—Library Journal

“A charming, delightful collection for Beatles fans and music fans in general.”
—Kirkus 

“The brilliant and varied essays pull the tablecloth from under so-familiar songs, revealing bits and pieces in new configurations, and in contexts that are personal, technical, social, and universal. A collection that music fans and fans of music writing will love.”
—Booklist
 
“The collection serves as a miniature history of the Beatles. The essays are uniformly excellent and informative.”
—Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

03/01/2017
With this perceptive, heartfelt collection, Blauner (Coach; Brothers) has compiled pieces from 29 writers such as Francine Prose, Rebecca Mead, and Chuck Klosterman, each of whom muses on a particularly inspiring Beatles song. Though the anthology is tinged with affection, it's no mere love letter to the group. Along with sentimental remembrances of childhoods spent picking out a favorite Beatle is probing critical analysis: Nicholas Dawidoff untangles myriad threads--John Lennon's dreamy vocals, the influence of Buddy Holly--to achieve a deeper understanding of "A Day in the Life"; Peter Blauner teases out Paul McCartney's subtle yet significant contributions to "And Your Bird Can Sing." Understandably, some selections pack more of a punch than others. The most powerful pieces combine examinations of the songs with an emphasis on the intimate: the buoyant "Octopus's Garden" is the backdrop for Elissa Schappell's quietly searing essay about her father, who was diagnosed with cancer when she was a teenager; Gerald Early uses "I'm a Loser" to explore gender, socioeconomic class, and ethnicity. VERDICT This insightful addition is bound to appeal to serious Beatles aficionados, longtime followers of the group seeking a nostalgic walk down "Penny Lane," and casual music fans.--Mahnaz Dar, School Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

2017-03-02
What's your favorite Beatles song?That's what literary agent and author Blauner (editor: The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages, 2015, etc.) asked some well-known novelists, journalists, music critics, actors, and musicians. Each contributes a pithy essay explaining why. Organized chronologically, a few standards are here—"I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Yesterday," "Let It Be"—as well as a few surprises. David Hajdu, music critic for the Nation, picks a song that usually ends up on the worst-songs list, "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)." In an interview, however, Paul McCartney said it was "probably my favorite Beatles track." John Lennon "relished" it, as well, and Hajdu finds it "irresistibly, if vexingly, compelling." Singer Shawn Colvin writes, "lyrically, I can't think of another heartbreak song as satisfying to sing as ‘I'll Be Back.' " Rosanne Cash picks "No Reply" from 1965: "a handful of words, expertly woven into a fierce melody." New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik is a fan of the 1967 double A-sided single "Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane," a "perfect expression of the Beatles' art at the high point of their artistry." Chuck Klosterman "loves" the "sixth-best song ["Helter Skelter"] on their fifth-best album" because it "intermittently resembles the blades of a lawn mower falling out of alignment after hitting a brick." Throughout the collection, we learn a great deal about how these songs came to be written and what the Beatles thought about them. Lennon dismissed "Let It Be" as "a bad Christmas carol." The first song a female musician played on was "She's Leaving Home." Other Beatles' fans picking their favorites include David Duchovny, Jane Smiley, Amy Bloom, Pico Iyer, Rebecca Mead, Jon Pareles, Alec Wilkinson, Touré, and the sly Rick Moody, who cheats, picking the "Golden Slumbers"/ "Carry That Weight"/ "The End" medley. A charming, delightful collection for Beatles fans and music fans in general.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170843138
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	05/23/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,045,526

Read an Excerpt

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***
She Loves You

ROZ  C H A S T

“SHE LOVES YOU” was released in the U.S. in September 1963, when I was eight—almost nine—years old. That song provided my first inkling that there was another world out there, one that did not include my parents, my relatives, my neighbors, my teachers, or my classmates—a world of care‑ free and attractive young people who did not worry about illnesses or money, and who did not care about homework or why one was not popular. The reason they did not think about these things was obvious: they were too busy having fun and being young.

When I heard “She Loves You”—that exuberant singing, like nothing I’d ever heard before—I became aware not only that that world existed, but also that I deeply wanted to be part of it. Before the Beatles, pop music didn’t really register with me. I’m sure I’d heard it, but it didn’t “reach” me. It was boring; a bunch of mushy love songs sung by icky guys with irritating voices and greasy hair and even ickier girls with2 ROZ  CHAST bouffants. Ugh. Gross. A lateral move from the shackles of childhood to a different, but equally shackled, adulthood.

So, what was it about “She Loves You” that felt like an anthem of liberation? Perhaps it was that chorus of “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” or maybe it was that thrilling “Wooooo!” Or maybe it was the Beatles themselves. I’d never seen any‑ thing like them. I watched the Beatles sing on Ed Sullivan, with their funny suits and haircuts, bouncing to the beat of their music and playing their instruments, and was completely, totally, in love. They were sexy, for sure, but not smarmy or creepy. I wouldn’t say they were “wholesome,” either, which implies a kind of rosy‑cheeked, outdoorsy, earnestness that has never, ever appealed to me. No. This was something else entirely.

That spring, the one after the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, I was nine, and my parents and I went to Puerto Rico for a week. It was a school vacation, and since my parents worked in the New York City school system, they had the week off, too. I had befriended another nine‑year‑old only child who was staying at the hotel with her parents. Big shockeroo: we were both Beatlemaniacs. At some point, our two families were in a car driving to some tourist attraction. As the parents were chatting, she and I decided to sing “She Loves You” as loud as we could. We didn’t know most of the words, but we knew when to sing the “Yeah, yeah, yeah” and the “Wooooooo.” More than fifty years later I still remember how thrilling this was. I don’t recall any of the grown‑ups getting particularly mad at us. They were just baffled. This was for us, this kind of music. Not for them. And that was okay with all of us.

I had a record player in my room. There were no speakers. You opened it up like a suitcase, plugged it in, plopped your record onto the spindle in the middle, and manually placed the arm that held the needle onto the record as carefully as you could, because you didn’t want to scratch the record. Anyway, my first Beatles record turned out not to be a Beat‑ les record at all. It came from a discount store in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, and it had a drawing of four Beatle‑ish hairdos on the cover. That was what fooled me. When I got it home, I immediately realized my mistake: these were instrumental versions of Beatles songs. There wasn’t even any singing! Total rip‑off. My first experience with false advertising.

When I was in third grade and close to the bottom of the social pecking order—not the very bottom, but, like I said, close—the four most popular girls put on a show for the rest of the class. They dressed up like the Beatles in suits and Beatle boots and Beatle wigs. Three of them pretended to strum guitars they had made out of cardboard. The fourth played a drum. I don’t recall whether it was a real drum or made out of cardboard like the guitars. They sang a couple of Beatles songs in front of the class for our entertainment. One of them was “She Loves You,” and when they sang “Wooooo!” they shook their heads like the Beatles. I watched them with a kind of envy. Everyone applauded. I hated to acknowledge it, but they were great.

My parents were not interested in popular music. Even Frank Sinatra and big band music were beneath them. And jazz? Don’t ask. My mother played classical piano: Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy were her favorites. Sometimes my parents listened to a little show music— songs from Carousel or Oklahoma! They liked Gilbert and Sullivan. My father loved French music. He was a French teacher and a Francophile. Sometimes he listened to Yves Montand or Edith Piaf. To their ears, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Mamas and the Papas all sounded identical. One of the more shameful fights I had with them as an adult was getting angry with them because they didn’t listen to Billie Holliday or Ella Fitzgerald when I was growing up.

When I think about “She Loves You,” and how much I loved that song, how new it sounded, and how happy it made me feel to hear it, I think about how much it represented the mirage of a possible future, one that was more joyful and more interesting than my lonely and borderline‑grim child‑ hood with its homework and tests and mean girls and stupid boys and parents who worried about everything and got angry over nothing. A promise that, in the future, things would be better, or at least I would have greater autonomy. And now that I am a grown‑up, I can say that even though I’m not skipping along a jewel‑bedecked street lined with chocolate‑truff le trees while angels throw rose petals at me, it’s definitely better than being a kid.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "In Their Lives"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Andrew Blauner.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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