All You Need Is Love
It used to be that wherever I traveled, at some point, I would hear the Beatles playing. It was as if they were part of a great worldwide playlist. The band broke up right about the time I was born and Beatlemania was long gone. But the music made a long fire that has never really gone out completely. So of course they came to me on the radio, through my sisters’ record collections, through friends; the background noise of my childhood.
And they were my companion on journeys. It was the radio in the Moon Bar in Hangzhou, on the ferry to Santorini, at the bus station in El Rosario, and on mix tapes in the car. They were sound of street musicians everywhere. But like waking up one morning and finding that you are an adult, the times I hear the Beatles during my travels has grown thinner with the years. I went out in the world and they weren’t there to meet me. These days, I am more likely to hear Pink Floyd and Bob Marley (and in one instance a reggae version of Pink Floyd’s Money), two bands with nearly as large a footprint.
The genesis for Road Songs was the idea that for me, there is always that one song that that augments and defines a journey, a marker of a place at a particular time. In 1986, Europe was awash with the new British Invasion; bands like U2, The Police, The English Beat, Style Council, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Alphaville, Tears for Fears, and so many more. And I was in love with them all. And yet, it was the Beatles who followed me around on my first trip to Europe, through London bars and the Paris Metro and down the Munich alleys, right down to a busker on the Piazza de Spagna in Rome and his earnest rendition of All You Need is Love without regard for language or guitar skills. It’s not my favorite Beatle tune, but it is something larger than pretty good pop or a return to the very good ideals of peace and love. It is the sound of being 16, in love with the color and noise of the world that I was just beginning to see, freedom, and being a happily lost in a strange place.
I like the idea of a world tied together by music. It makes a large fractured planet feel smaller and more hopeful. If the Beatles served that function, so much the better. Our need for music is universal. Of course, times change. That the Beatles probably no longer create that tie makes me think of my own mortality; change I am powerless to slow or stop. Other artists, younger artists, have stepped into that role. In 2017, I couldn’t travel anywhere without hearing Ed Sheeran’s The Shape of You. Admittedly, I’m not a fan and I find that song particularly grating. But it makes me sort of happy that there is a common thread that ran through our daily experiences.
