What Would You Think if I Sang Out of Tune?

The other day, on our drive home from Glacier National Park, that girl and I listened to the Beatles Channel on Sirius XM Radio.  That girl cranked up the volume on Hello, Goodbye and While My Guitar Gently Weeps.  We sang along as high clouds flicked up and over the windshield of our car.   Wide, grassy scarps and endless green grain fields swelled as we neared them.  The mountains of the Rocky Mountain Front high-kicked and bucked along the horizon to our right.

“It’s so amazing I can remember the lyrics after all these years,” that girl commented.

I nodded in agreement.

Everything seemed fitting together as it should.

The Beatles are a singularity.  They are not a single season.  They are all seasons.

Funny, I should feel that way now.  I was seven when I first saw the Beatles playing I Want to Hold Your Hand on The Ed Sullivan show.  I immediately thought them silly and soapy.

I didn’t like them.

Honestly, I didn’t pay much attention to The Beatles for the first few years.  Then I heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  That album—the first ever concept album—changed everything for me.  I began to listen, more importantly, to hear.

My love for the Beatles reaches back from that album and sprints forward from that album.  That is the nexus to all their music—traditional and experimental.

On we drove, the pair of us, under a sky that really is bigger than all others.  Singing along with the soapy songs and the surreal.  The hours somehow becoming only minutes.      

--Mitchell Hegman