#tom odell

This beautiful new song “Best Day of My Life” by Tom Odell is being released tomorrow.

melancholy evenings - not sad about anything specific, but the night is always a little lonely, y'know?

oh to be at such peace - playlist inspired by @etherea1ity‘spost

i have loved you. i have had to deal with that. - these songs remind me that love is out there and that even if it hurts sometimes i crave it more than anything

pulvis et umbra sumus. - a dark academia aesthetic playlist

Two Beatles Documentaries!

I’ve watched a lot of Beatles docs in the past several months. Lots of them retread the same ground, with slightly different sound bytes from talking heads, so it was a pleasure to find Going Underground: McCartney, The Beatles And The UK Counter-cultureandHow the Beatles Changed the World. Despite the slightly pretentious titles, both films (directed by Tom O'Dell) offer a very different framework than the usual straightforward biography, and I think both are really useful for contextualizing the Beatles within their cultural moment.

The argument is essentially that the Beatles both responded to culture and pushed culture along, somehow straddling popularity and the avant garde, and opening doors for fans and later artists that, so the trope goes, would never have existed without them. While failing (in my view) to adequately explore the thought experiment of just what would have been different, it does put the Beatles in their place in history and made me think about things in a new way. There was plenty of new information in both because it wasn’t just about the Beatles but about the culture, so I really appreciated that.

They do suffer from that most common of Beatliana ailments, too many dicks on the dance floor, but that probably tells you something significant about the cultural scene as well. Lots of Barry Miles and your familiar roundup of authors, but I still thought both were worth it for their effort to tell a different part of the story in what I found a useful way.