"In My Life" by Lennon/McCartney
Singalong 027: Some have gone and some remain
“There are places I'll remember / All my life though some have changed / Some forever not for better / Some have gone and some remain”
I remember being a kid and hearing this song. It was a window into grownup world, where the people who had ‘lives’ wrote songs about them. It was heavy, philosophical. I didn’t understand a thing. Being six, I was baffled by the sheer timeframe of the song. “Places I’ll remember…” What places, what memories? I was still moment to moment.
“All these places had their moments / With lovers and friends I still can recall / Some are dead and some are living / In my life I've loved them all”
All I could surmise was that this guy had lived. He’d not only had friends but lovers. What was a lover? Places, moments, memories losing their meaning? I mean, censors will try to protect kids from porn and violence, but this song was the real affront to my innocence. Brazenly exposing the sheer enormity of life.
For all that I saw going on around me, “In My Life” was like a billboard I would pass on the road to turning ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty. My “life” was getting under way, whether I felt ready or not. The friends and lovers were mostly in my future.
John never reached fifty. 40 was his last stop. I was still a kid when it happened.
“But of all these friends and lovers / There is no one compares with you / And these memories lose their meaning / When I think of love as something new”
But how could someone know so much at 25 when he wrote “In My Life”? Paul claims to have written the melody, it’s one of the only songs where they disagreed about who contributed what elements of the authorship. Which is weird. Even though these guys were just cranking out songs in those days, I feel like I’d probably remember if I’d written this song or not. I guess these guys had a lot going on in those days.
Still, Paul does have that ability to create melodies that feel like they have always been there, all along. Must have been infuriating for John.
“Though I know I'll never lose affection / For people and things that went before / I know I'll often stop and think about them”
The Beatles canon contains the seeds of so much that came later, but these songs also are a bridge from classical music to the present. This particular one could almost run like a Bach chorale, the form is so precise and graceful. Of course, George Martin’s piano interlude gives it away too.
But here was a crew of composers in the truest sense. They knew they were creating for posterity, even if you couldn’t hear anything above the din of screaming girls.
“In my life I love you more / In my life I love you more”
Some have gone and some remain:
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