“Why is that your favourite band or artist?” That's like asking someone why they love their spouse/partner. One can answer what they like (and don't) about them but not why they love them. Love just is. This long and not AI-written (inside joke that Scott will recognize) response also answers the how and probably many other questions.
When I was 11 or so, (I was born in '67) I was not at all into music. My 17 months younger sister was going through the Leif Garrett Sean Cassidy Tiger Beat pin-up phase. My mother bought her a few cassettes for Chanukah. One of those was The Beatles Blue Album Greatest Hits Anthology 1967-1970. Randi hated it. I popped it in my Panasonic tape recorder/player and instantly fell in love with Strawberry fucking Fields Forever and every song that followed--ay 11!!. I'm crying now. Had my mother given her the Red Album 1962-1966, we might not be having this conversation. Synchronicity. (Yes, it's never been lost on me since I became spiritually awakened and aware of synchronicity that is an awesome Police album. I saw them twice on that tour in '84 I think--but I love, love their first album--when I saw them at MSG sometime btw 2000 and 2009 (I can only place that I was with my then wife/kids' mother) the encore consisted of the first three songs off that totally punkish album)(and now I have a pub dedicated to celebrating synchronicity and Anthi and I are making a push to reinvigorate it with new writers https://medium.com/p/97516b44185a). I digressed--I do that.
In my first ever piece of self-expository writing in 2013 that I published here in 2020 and which covered so many topics that I called it a self portrait in essay form https://medium.com/p/7bdac6f1510e, I wrote:
"The Beatles are proof to me of the existence of “God.” In July of 1964 they perfected pop (A Hard Days Night (their first album without any cover tunes) was released). A few months after releasing Help! in August 1965, they began to take music to a place it had never been before and hasn’t been since. In a year and a half, they released Rubber Soul (December 1965), Revolver (August 1966), Strawberry Fields Forever as the A-side and Penny Lane as the B-side of a single (February 1967) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (June 1967). Absorb Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s in that order (I recommend the mono mix of Sgt. Pepper’s over the stereo mix). Hear the nuances and the techniques never before realized and being expanded and perfected over the course of those albums. Universal influence is apparent. The creative advancement, out of nowhere, cannot otherwise be explained.
I love how music triggers memories — often bringing me back to a time that now seems simpler and yearned for — but in reality those times were no simpler than the present — maybe it just seems that way because I survived them — because they are safely in the past?"
Proof of the existence of God. I probably felt that connection to that which I did not understand for most of my life that followed.
I think I just answered the why I fell in love with The Beatles. Plus the perfect mix of fate + free will = destiny. Are We Puppets?, A discussion between fate, destiny, and free will in a bar https://medium.com/p/bc4baa1bfd09
I felt a connection that has never left me even when I didn't feel it.
I wrote this Senryu a couple of years ago. It's called The Presence of God:
"Goosebump raising surge
kinetic energy says
God present for all"
"Note: “present” is a double entendre"
I explained the genesis of the poem with this anecdote from my life:
"In 1996, during my first and mostly forgotten foray into the 12-Stepverse, the rehab took us to a “meeting.” The speaker told the story of his suicidal ideation. He had terrible insomnia along with alcoholism. He would stay up nights, drinking in his basement, planning his family-annihilation suicide. He spent many a night meticulously planning for and rigging the boiler to explode to take out himself, his wife, and his children as his family slept. Then, the night he was ready to pull the switch, he fell asleep. At that moment of listening to him tell that story, I felt a follicle-exciting, hair-raising surge of energy. For the first time, I felt the presence of God in my life. A presence I later forgot about for too long, but God never forgot about me."
Yes, Scott, I could turn this into a proper essay but I'd rather just check the box to publish it to my profile, which cannot be MPP metered, and email it as well to my subscribers, and they can discover your piece that way.
