There are those enamored with Valentine’s Day, allowing that their romantic situation is favorable, and there are those wanting nothing to do with it, typically because theirs is not. These factions would seem to be holiday rivals of a sort, like people who can’t get enough of all Christmas and the camp bemoaning its commercialism. Both groups fixate on the idea of romantic love, which seems exclusionary and, paradoxically, limiting, something true love never is.
There was a time after they disbanded when the Beatles were presented as popsmith love merchants. After all, they did seem to sing a lot about one-to-one romantic relationships. Those love songs were played on oldies stations, which is where many people who weren’t around in the 1960s got their first dose of this music. You were exposed to “All My Loving” rather than “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
But the Beatles had no finer song of untrammeled affection than 1965’s “In My Life,” which isn’t a love song in the mode of any love song before or since. This was one of their departure numbers — a maiden voyage of a work leading to future ports of entry.
The song is John Lennon’s, and he intended it to feature a slew of names of places he’d been to and people he’d known. The initial result: an overwritten, unwieldy mess for a songwriter who was about to reach a career with the forthcoming “Rubber Soul.”
Lennon began again, as we must often do even in the best relationships, for that is one of their core principles of their success and the antidote to stagnation. Out went the names, and in came a sweeping, elegiac — but life-fostering — quality that operates as a sonic treatise on the nature of love itself. To love, we must embrace that grand elegiac sweep of possibility, seizing our chance, and letting go so as not to be pinioned and kept from who and what we may love.
Lennon sounds — perhaps for the first time in his songwriting career — at peace. We pursue affection, but it’s crucial that we internally position ourselves to be able to let affection into our lives as well. Love isn’t merely a one-to-one relationship. There is love of place, love of the future one envisions, love of the experiences that a person has had. Love of who they are. Love of what they believe in trying to become. Love of art like “In My Life.”
The singer of this song has no age. They’re not a man in his 20s, they’re not some hermit on the hill with decades of accrued answers. They are a man only in the sense of vocal timbre; this is love’s spirit in musical form. The elegiac sweep involves the clearing away of detritus. What we might call “the noise” today; less of a blocking out than a waving away with the hand to get to that which most matters.
As a pop love song, “In My Life” may have no match, but like the best of loves, it transcends simple definitions and familiar notions, while hitting us as that which we feel as true. The singer speaks of knowing that he’ll love someone as he loves no one else, but this is no contest, no game of romantic ranking. It’s a song about being present and thinking, with the bolstering epiphany that every moment is also connected to others preceding it, for the person we are in that present moment is a product of much that predates it.
Do you know who you can share “In My Life” with as a Valentine’s song? Everyone. Your spouse. Your best friend. Your child. Yourself. We’re talking a major work of the human heart.
The song presages the intense self-aware interiority of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” written in the autumn of the next year. George Martin plays a cod-Baroque piano solo which is meant to suggest a harpsichord, underscoring the gap between a fixed time and place and the sweep of love immemorial. “In My Life” began in somewhat contrived mode and ended up becoming a song in which there’s not a false note, be it musically, emotionally, or romantically.
In a world where we’re so often insincere in hopes of securing what we want — which sometimes means doing or saying whatever’s necessary not to be alone — “In My Life” speaks to the place—as it highlights the power of place — we must get to if love is to do what love can do. Hear the very sound of that paramount locale in this song and take it to heart.
Fleming is a writer.
