The Beatles classic that Elliott Smith called “probably my favourite song ever”
Music is about exultation; it always has been since sticks were brayed against cave walls to break up the monotony of hunting. It serves as a conduit to transcendence, skewing our views for just a moment. Although it isn’t often noted owing to the amount of joy they gave the world, this sense of escapism was all the more important for The Beatles.
The band had a tough upbringing. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney had lost their mothers when they were essentially children, and then, with barely enough time to grow, they were thrust towards a level of fame that the world had never seen before. Despite this, they always strived to be a symbol of hope. As Elliott Smith once said: “Sometimes the most amazing thing to me about Lennon is that he kept a positive identity despite such a cracked upbringing and crazy fame.”
Although Smith’s own legacy is now unfortunately subsumed by the troublesome ‘tortured artist’ tag, he too aimed to bring comfort to the disenfranchised masses in the same fashion as his heroes, The Beatles. “I rarely think of John Lennon as dead,” he told Spin in a quote that now seems spookily prescient. “There’s too much life in his music to think of him as gone.”
This notion of art standing as your legacy is something that Smith abided by. His output, he thought, should be idiosyncratic and personal. This goal of uniqueness is what crowned David Bowie’s classic Hunky Dory as one of his favourite albums. Smith was interested in anything that only one artist or band could’ve written and the desire to test creative boundaries. As he says, “Playing things too safe is a popular way to fail.”
The Beatles dared to venture beyond safety and drag the public along with them. This was driven by the spiritual need to seize life, which they found out was all too short at a young age. One track that typified this was ‘A Day in the Life’, and Smith fittingly described it as “probably my favourite song ever.”
Adding: “Of course, now I have many, many favorite songs, but a lot of them are still Lennon songs.”
The track is a beacon for exultation. For many fans, ‘A Day in the Life’ is the pinnacle of The Beatles. It is the moment when the fevered experimentation of Sgt. Peppers culminated in a masterpiece of pure musical alchemy. The epic track is a menagerie of interwoven news articles. The song functions as a front-to-back rock opera of a slow news day, with John Lennon perusing current events of varying degrees of importance and transposing them into a song that says you’ve got to weigh up what’s really important in life, like embracing the beauty of the music blasting these trivialities to smithereens, reflecting Smith’s view on the message of rock ‘n’ roll, that “sometimes you gotta freak out”.
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