The 10 Best Books I Read in 2025

Phil Christman, Why Christians Should be Leftists

A wonderful, short--and yes, somewhat rambling, but only in the way the best kind of earnest testimonies ramble--affirmation of the undisputable truth (or at least so I think) that Christianity, at its core, is a universal, egalitarian, socialist--that is, a leftist--message. It's not so much an argument (though there are good arguments within it) as an altar call, but that altar it calls its readers to is one I fully embrace. More here, if you're so inclined.

Tobias Cremer, The Godless Crusade

There are a lot of books that have been written over the past decade trying to make sense of the rise of right-wing populism as a genuinely powerful electoral reality in Europe and America (and elsewhere, though this book only refers to polities outside of North America and Western Europe very briefly); this is the best one I've read yet. A serious work of scholarship, based on both survey data and sociological analysis, Cremer doesn't so much break new ground as provide a clarifying language to understand the world of Brexit, Donald Trump, and the rest. His detailed case for seeing the heart of this movement, across national borders, as an ersatz religion, a political religious identity without any spiritual substance, is undeniable, I think.

David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

I listened to this book with Melissa during a long drive, and I was absolutely capitvated; this was one case where the audio experience of hearing read aloud a thrilling historical tale of shipwrecks, mutiny, and survival--and all the personalities and conflicts which came before it, and all the political fallout that came afterwards--was a perfect match.

Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

I'm a sucker of everything (or nearly everything, I guess) Beatles related, and this book was no exception. This is a delightful and insightful addition to the Beatles canon, a look at the John and Paul relationship and songwriting partnership organized around and viewed through their songs--an approach which is sometimes a little forced, but more often than not kind of revelatory. As I explained here, this book forced me to do what I should have one years ago: really give John's musical ouevre a thorough listen, which took up much of my year. I'm glad I did it.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman

This one was another audio listen during another long drive, but this time the script was acted out as a radio play, and it was delightful. I'd read parts of this comic collection before, but after listening to it all, I had to track it down and give it a read myself, all in one sitting. This all happened during the summer, as part of a family gathering in Wisconsin, before we all went to see the new Superman movie--and considering the 2025's Superman not only ended up being one of my favorite movies of the year, but also inspired some serious commentary on my part, the presentation of the character in All-Star Superman (widely regarded as one of the best ever, as well as an inspiration for the movie) stands in my mind as one of my favorite narrative experiences of the year.

Jonathan Rauch, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy

Rauch's book wasn't one of my favorite reads this year, but it was a book that made me think, and then rethink, my own understanding of the place my own faith community has within the history, the politics, and the ideas which characterize the American society that Rauch and I both value (however differently). My thoughts about the book are somewhat critical, but I also have to give it some respect: it's argument about the contributions with Mormonism can made to American pluralism and democracy are definitely reductive, and in some ways wrong, but are valuable and challenging as well, all the same.

Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry

Why this book? I'm not really sure--the whole Murderbot series,which my wife has been raving about for a couple of years now, is a tremendous delight; I had not greater pure reading joy this year than the weeks during which I tore through all six of these books. Wells has created a host of awesome science-fiction characters with great, funny, and even sometimes deeply engaging backgrounds and narrative voices; following their adventures is an absolute hoot, and occasionally even moving as well. I suppose I chose this one because it is the most recently published, and also because it is a superb, self-contained story: Murderbot investigating a murder, using his brains and his slightly lessening misanthropy to solve the case. Great stuff.

Norman Wirzba, The Paradise of God and Agrarian Spirit

Wirzba is an author that I've been familiar with for a while; his essays on Christianity, ecology, and sustainability have often informed my thinking and teaching over the years. But this year I taught, for the first time, a religion course at Friends University, and the topic was "Christian Resources for the Care of Creation"--and these two books by Wirzba became essential contributors to my lectures and discussion topics for the class. Paradise of God is better if you're looking for an explicitly environmentalist interpretation of key Biblical texts, particularly the Book of Genesis; but Agrarian Spirit is better if you're looking for something more pastoral, more political, and less grounded in Biblical theology. Both are wonderful, essential books for helping people to construct a Christian environmental ethic.

Daniel Wortel-London, The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981

This is not a work of political theory; it's a history of urban development, of finance capitalism and its critics over nearly 150 years of New York City's growth and transformation. And yet, in covering this ideas and arguments, Wortel-London has written the best work of urban and political reflection that I've read in a long time. See more here, if you're interested (and yes, you absolutely should be!).

Listening to Lennon #8: Milk and Honey (Plus, a Summary)

John Lennon was murdered 45 years ago this evening, on December 8, 1980. The photo attached was taken that afternoon--ghoulishly, but entirely coincidentally, it includes the face of Mark Chapman, his assassin, who had been hanging around outside the apartment John and Yoko had lived in for the past five years, along with all the journalists and photographers who dogged Lennon constantly, hoping to get an autograph. Lennon obliged. (I've clipped Chapman out of the photo.)

Lennon was shot by Chapman after returning to his apartment with Yoko after hours in the studio, recording and polishing a song by Yoko, "Walking on Thin Ice." Like several of her tracks on both Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey, the final, posthumous release of original music by Lennon, Yoko was merging her avant-garde musical sensibilities with post-punk and post-disco styles, making use of synthesizers and drum machines in a way that didn't make her music that foreign to what would soon be called "New Wave" on early 1980s American radio. That doesn't mean the song itself is very good, despite Lennon apparently declaring in the studio, perhaps less than a hour before his murder, that "you just cut your first number one, Yoko." By my hearing, Yoko's better stuff was, appropriately, that which she released in conjunction with her husband's final tracks. That's not the only reason to take Milk and Honey seriously, though.

I wasn't looking forward to listening to this album. I figured that, even if I give Yoko the benefit of the doubt and assume that she genuinely believed these left-over tracks from the Double Fantasy sessions were good enough to be deserving of public release, as a way to honor her late husband and his legions of fans, the results couldn't possibly avoid feeling like a cash grab. Well, I was wrong; Milk and Honey feels instead like a definite studio production in it's own right. Not a perfect one; it definitely has some filler on it among John's stuff. "(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess" is an unfinished, sappy ditty, and "Grow Old With Me" is a weak demo recording of a song of great, but completely unrealized, potential. But the energy and wit that Double Fantasy showed Lennon re-embracing after years away from the studio are very much on display on "I'm Stepping Out" (a delightfully poppy number), "I Don't Wanna Face It" (a slick, bluesy rocker), and especially "Nobody Told Me," easily one of the smartest, catchiest, grooviest pop songs that Lennon ever recorded in his entire career, solo or with the Beatles; why it wasn't on Double Fantasy in the place of one of the weaker tracks like "Cleanup Time" makes no sense to me at all. And then there's "Borrowed Time," an underproduced recording that manages to be charming and unintentionally haunting at the same time. 

And as for Yoko? While her tracks aren't in dialogue with John's as happens in the best parts of Double Fantasy--which would have been truly perverse if she'd tried, since she went to work on this album in 1983--several of them stand up as solid, if sometimes slight, dance and electronica-pop. "Sleepness Night" has too much of her patented (and often tired) transgressiveness to really be enjoyable, and "O' Sanity" is just silly, but "Don't Be Scared" is an actually compelling little mystery of a song, "Your Hands" is a dreamlike ballad, "Let Me Count the Ways" remarkably actually makes me see Yoko as a mother singing a lullaby to Sean, and "You're the One," with it's spooky compelling cricket chirps, should have been a single: I would put it alongside some of the best weird pop put out by Blondie, Kate Bush, or Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Overall, I give Milk and Honey a B+, the same as Double Fantasy, something I definitely did not expect. Which means that if we rank all of Lennon's, and Lennon and Ono's, post-Beatles albums together, it looks something like this:

Rock 'n' Roll: A

Imagine: A- 

Double Fantasy: B+

Milk and Honey: B+

Plastic Ono Band: B 

Walls and Bridges: B

Mind Games: B-

Some Time in New York City: D+ 

In retrospect, when I compare this list to my summary of Paul McCartney's far larger -post-Beatles output (23 albums at the time I wrote that review, and I wasn't even counting everything he'd put out--including leaving aside two cover albums which this journey though John's work made me go back and review properly), I think I've been nicer to John than he deserves. But then again--perhaps Paul's own constant output simply invites unfair comparisons? Who knows how I would have felt about Macca if he'd slowed down, been less of omnipresent workhorse? But it's not as though I could ever truly ask for less from Paul, the Best Beatle. And similarly, I'd give just about anything if John, the First Beatle, could have been spared, and we could have heard more from him. A tragedy, in so many ways. But he left his mark, both through his band and on his own--and, crucially, through the artistic and emotional impact he had on work of his greatest partners. On the day he died, in the final interview he gave, John commented "There’s only two artists I’ve ever worked with for more than one night’s stand, as it were: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. I think that’s a pretty damned good choice." I couldn't possibly disagree.

 

Listening to Lennon #7: Double Fantasy

Double Fantasy is an iconic album, for obvious reasons. Leaving behind Los Angeles, May Pang, the experiments (and exasperation) in the studio of Walls and Bridges, and the legal headaches (and rock and roll delights) of cranking out old covers on Rock 'n' Roll, Lennon settled back in New York City and reconciled with Yoko Ono, who gave birth to their one child together, Sean Lennon, on October 9, 1975. And Lennon promptly left the music business to focus on his son for close to five years. When he returned with Double Fantasy, his first musical collaboration with Ono since Some Time in New York City eight years before, he was 40 years old, looking into the 1980s, and ready for another stage in his life. And, of course, was tragically murdered less than a month after the album's official release. How could such a story not lend the album it left behind a certain mystique? 

But there's even more to it than that. There's Lennon's wild experience while sailing to Bermuda in June 1980, when sickness and fatigue left every other member of the crew unable to handle the ship's wheel, and Lennon guided the boat alone through a storm for six hours. He came out of that challenge invigorated, excited, but also feeling vulnerable in a manner unlike that produced by his many journeys through various therapies years before, and desperately wanting to make music again. There is, of course, his constant, never-finished feelings of affection and competition with Paul McCartney; "Coming Up," a disco-ish, heavily synthesized and drum machine-driven tune Macca had recorded in the summer of 1979, was released in advance of McCartney II in the spring of 1980, and John loved it--"It's driving me crackers!" he supposedly said, reigniting his competitive drive. (To be clear, while I like the song, I don't care much for the album.) And there was the increasing artistic maturity of his relationship with Yoko; the post-punk music in the clubs of NYC in the late 1970s, from the Talking Heads to the B-52s, struck him as providing a new idiom for some of Ono's avant-garde sensibilities, strongly calling him to write alongside them again. All together, by the summer of 1980, John and Yoko were both writing songs, and come the autumn they were in the recording studio--though keeping the news of their imminent re-emergence on the pop music scene as much a secret as possible. I wish I had memories of the impact of Lennon's return late in that year, but I wasn't a Beatles fan at age 11--and within weeks, the story of the Smart Beatle making music again was overwhelmed by the news of his death.

I can understand how the initial reviews of the album were less than enthusiastic, as most of the first side is only occasionally captivating. "(Just Like) Starting Over" is a fine and catchy pop song, but beyond the initial listening, it seems a little pleading. Ono's "Kiss Kiss Kiss" definitely shows a greater pop sensibility than what's she'd brought into the studio in the past, but still, this insistent faux-orgasm of a song is kind of embarrassing. Then comes Lennon's "Cleanup Time"--again, a nice effort at a soulful rocker, but nothing special, followed by Ono's "Give Me Something," which is just an unfinished dance-club riff.

But then listeners to the album are rewarded with a run of songs that shows not just how talented a musician Lennon was, but also smart, how capable of seeing, both musically and lyrically, how to put a musical statement together. "I'm Losing You" is a sharp, deeply introspective, self-critical, while still insistent number; it folds directly into Ono's "I'm Moving On," which is I think the first time in this whole series that I've heard her singing voice--pitched to accentuate the growling anger of the song--truly complement an arrangement (though she still insists on that weird cackle at the end). The songs are genuinely in conversation with each other, a conversation that one can imagine capturing key moments from all the ups and downs of John and Yoko's marriage over the years. Then comes the simply gorgeous, calypso-flavored lullaby/love song to Sean, "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)," followed by "Watching the Wheels," one of the very few straight-up superb pop songs whose autobiographical focus amounts to actual, rather than ersatz, Zen philosophy ("Ah, people asking questions / lost in confusion / Well, I tell them there's no problem / only solutions"). Yoko's "Yes, I'm Your Angel" is another smart take on her odd musical presence, turning her into in a vaudeville chanteuse. And then the best song on the album: Lennon's "Woman." Lennon called this, in an interview before his murder, a grown-up Beatles tune, the way he and the lads would have recorded "Girl" if they'd had more years and wisdom under their belts. It's by no means a fully feminist song; Lennon never achieved the kind of empathy that McCartney could manufacture on a moment's notice. But for an Englishman born and raised in the 1940s and 1950s, especially one with the complicated (and, yes, partly self-induced) traumas that Lennon carried, his desire for forgiveness and his expression of appreciation for what women have meant for him--particularly his soulmate Yoko, but also just the presence of the maternal and the feminine in his life generally--in this simple but still lush and melodious song is truly kind of beautiful, I think.

Yoko dominates the rest of the album with a few forgettable (though thankfully not particularly screechy) songs, with one last poppy, sappy ditty from John: "Dear Yoko." But overall, Lennon had every reason to be proud of this album; it's a strong B+ collection of songs. Tragic that he ended up having so little time to reflect on what he and his wife had accomplished.

Listening to Lennon #6: Rock 'n' Roll (along with McCartney's CHOBA B CCCP and Run Devil Run)

It would be nice to believe that Lennon wanted, in early 1975, with his immigration woes and his conflicts with the U.S. government apparently finally coming to an end, and with his decision to return to New York City, the American city he loved best, to turn back to his earliest musical loves for inspiration, and that he would decide to record a bunch of rock and roll tunes from the 1950s as an affirmation of such. Unfortunately, no. Not that Lennon still didn't love this music; he absolutely did, and the care he showed in the eventual production of the tunes on this record, as well as the passion and joy that comes out through them, makes that clear. But as anyone with access to Wikipedia can tell you, Rock 'n' Roll doesn't actually have anything to do with all of those 1975 moments or decisions or transitions. Instead, we have this album--which, at this point in my listening to Lennon's solo oeuvre, I kind of think is his very best work--solely due to a money-grubbing lawsuit.

So, very reductively: Lennon wrote "Come Together" for the Beatles in 1969, and while doing so he made use of some chords and part of one verse from the Chuck Berry tune, "You Can't Catch Me." Morris Levy, one of those promoters/entrepreneurs/crooks that were so common in the early days of rock and roll, had ended up with the copyright to the song, and he insisted on being paid royalties. In an out-of-court settlement, Lennon (or, rather, his lawyers, thought obviously Lennon signed off on the plan) agreed to record multiple tunes that Levy owned the copyright of, thus guaranteeing continuing royalties as "his" songs get released with the imprimatur of a Beatle. Originally Lennon was going to get these recordings done in Los Angeles in the winter of 1973-1974, but the recording sessions were chaotic, and Phil Spector, the producer, whom Lennon had worked very productively with on both Imagine and (perhaps somewhat less productively) Some Time in New York City, was descending into madness. In December 1973, Lennon terminated his working relationship with Spector, but Spector took and refused to turn over the recordings. Then in March 1974, Spector was in a near-fatal car crash, and the whole project was abandoned. Lennon went ahead and released the excellent Walls and Bridges, which Levy considered a violation of the settlement, and Levy threatened to refile his lawsuit. So finally, in October 1974, Lennon recorded, in just a few days, new versions of these songs he knew so well. Levy then insisted Lennon was dragging his feat, and when Lennon gave him copies of the unpolished studio demos to prove the album was moving forward, Levy quickly released them as a junk album on his own label, which led to additional suits and counter-suits between him, Lennon, and Capitol Records. The dude was a piece of work, that's for certain. 

But that piece of work got Lennon to do something that, if you listen to these songs, you know he always should have been doing: blasting out classic rock and roll with heart, wit, soul, and style. Very simply, Rock 'n' Roll is pretty much a perfect blast of great, groovy, head-bopping tunes. There isn't a single track on the album that is less than first-rate. "Be-Bop-a-Lula" is a rockabilly classic that the Beatles had regularly played all the way back in the Hamburg and Cavern Club days; Lennon sings it brilliantly. "Stand By Me" is obviously a proto-soul masterpiece, but it's hard to deny that Lennon's driving, bluesy cover of it just might be superior to the original. While you can't help but hear echoes of "Come Together" in his cover of "You Can't Catch Me," that actually just makes the song even better. Lennon makes Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame" feel even a little more dirty and therefore somehow more delightful, gives Bobby Freeman's "Do You Want to Dance?" a cool calypso swing, keeps Spector's "wall of sound" treatment and makes Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen"--another favorite of the Beatles--into a legitimate rave-up, and on it goes. "Peggy Sue," "Send Me Some Lovin', "Bony Moronie," "Bring It On Home to Me"--Lennon is simply on, all the way through this record. No notes, an A album, unquestionably.

Except, in giving it that grade, I kind of feel bad. For one thing, this isn't a measure of Lennon as a full musician; it shows us Lennon as a vocalist, arranger, band leader, guitarist, studio operator, and most of all as a nostalgic and delighted fan, but not as the songwriter who, in the Beatles and (sometimes) on his own, created his own set of standards which other vocalists, guitarists, band leaders, etc., have been listening to, loving, and striving to emulate for decades now, and no doubt will continue to for decades to come. Should I really count Rock 'n' Roll, a collection of covers, as a full part of Lennon's discography? I mean, I didn't include such cover albums with McCartney did the same.

But that made me think--maybe there's a reason for that? So I went back to what I wrote about Paul McCartney's incredible (and continuing!) artistic output back in 2019, when got around to listening to and writing about his two complete albums of rock and roll covers--1988's CHOBA B CCCP (or just The Russian Album), and 1999's Run Devil Run. In both cases I was brief, not considering these albums, much as I like them--called The Russian Album's "quite wonderful!" and Run Devil Run "pretty brilliant!"--as proper comparisons to Macca's many albums of original work. But Lennon's Rock 'n' Roll makes me want to give them a deeper consideration, to see if I can at least makes some comparisons between the rock and roll passion that McCartney demonstrated, and the terrific performance Lennon turned in on this album.

My conclusion? Well, I have to say--I think the historical consensus is right. McCartney is absolutely the better, broader musician of the two, stretching himself and doing things with his voice and his instruments (multiple ones!) that Lennon never could, or didn't live long enough to ever seriously try. And that breadth makes it impossible for him to treat classic rock and roll as a canon that can't be supplemented; he needs to bring pop, blues, jazz, and folk into the mix as well. All of which suggests that...yeah, maybe Lennon really was the one with the deeper, purer, rock and roll soul. That 's perhaps a limitation, but in some contexts--like when one wants to make a rock and roll album--it's a plus. 

Off The Russian Album, McCartney's cover of the R&B classic "Kansas City" can't be touched--which is perhaps predictable; it's one of his favorite songs, having made it a regular feature of early Beatles set-lists, and a song he'll sing in concert to this day. And his covers of "Lucille"--with McCartney doing is trademark Little Richards shout--and "That's All Right"--with him once again delivering an Elvis Presley-style drawl; he does the same on "Just Because"--are fabulous. But I just don't think Macca captured Sam Cooke's soul in "Bring It On Home to Me" the way his old best friend did, and his version of "Ain't That Shame" is more fun than feisty, missing what Lennon brought to the tune. On the other hand, when he provides rock and roll re-arrangements of the jazz standard "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" or the folk classic "Midnight Special," Macca hits gold. Similarly, on Run Devil Run, McCartney has great rock and roll chops. He checks off more rockabilly with "Blue Jean Bop," "Lonesome Town," and "Movie Magg," and he morphs into a juiced-up Elvis (though perhaps not quite as convincingly) once again for "All Shook Up," "I Got Stung," and "Party." All of it is solid. And, in contrast to his previous effort, I really love his take on Fats Domino on this album, with him injecting some doe-eyed sexuality into "Coquette." Again, though, I think the very best cover on the album was when Macca's muse leads him away from rock and roll, adding an accordion to Check Berry's "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," and turning it into a masterful bit of zydeco pop.

If I could go back to 2019, I'd give The Russian Album a solid B, maybe a B+; I'd give Run Devil Run the same, or maybe even all the way up to an A-; it really is that good. Both are fine collections of rock and roll standards. But are they as good as Lennon's? I just don't think so. If, at the end of this trip through Lennon's solo work, I have to conclude the very best collection of songs he ever put out were covers of a bunch of tunes that he'd learned by heart decades before, and could sing in his sleep--would that made him upset? Something tells me--especially when expressed in terms of him claiming some kind of rock and roll purist crown over his greatest friend and rival--he'd be just fine with it, in the end.

Listening to Lennon #5: Walls and Bridges

Lennon recorded Walls and Bridges back in New York City, in the summer of 1974, after having lived for most of the previous year away from Yoko Ono in Los Angeles. He and Yoko had not reconciled yet--that wouldn't happen until long after Wall and Bridges was completed, in February of 1975--but many tend to hear in the songs of this album echoes of Lennon's separation from his chosen partner, both in its occasionally wild, funky celebrations of excess and freedom, and in its self-pitying, mournful moments. I actually tend to disagree--to my ears, Walls and Bridges is an experimental and wide-ranging solo album, one whose tracks often sound disassociated from the musical styles and patterns that John had built over the years with the Beatles and on his own. I was genuinely surprised at how much I liked it.

Of course, for someone who had recorded such strange music as the albums he produced with Ono at the end of the 1960s--Unfinished Music No. 1, Unfinished Music No. 2, and Wedding Album--the tracks on Walls and Bridges wouldn't seem experimental at all. But within the bounds of pop music, they count, I think. Walls and Bridges shows a Lennon being brassy and funky in the style of Sly and the Family Stone, being soulful and country in the style of the Flying Burrito Brothers, and crooning and belting like either Elvis Presley or Tom Jones (he absolutely was not wrong when he said that "Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)" should have been sung by Frank Sinatra). Listening to the album, and hearing--yes, along with his conflicted, sometimes bitter, sometimes profoundly depressed, feelings over Yoko--his familial joy at reconnecting with Julian, his son by Cynthia (May Pang, John's sexual companion and general assistant during the "Lost Weekend," brought Julian out from London), and his naughty pissant joy of having a pack of drinking buddies again, and maybe most of all the genuine joy that being able to hang out, however briefly, with Paul and Linda McCartney once more obviously elicited from him--with all that nasty Beatles stuff behind them, even Lennon was ripping on Allen Klein by this time--all just makes me wonder. What if John had stayed in LA to record Walls and Bridges? What if Phil Spector hadn't gone through a mental breakdown and he and Lennon's 1973 Los Angeles sessions--which would eventually give rise to Lennon's next album, Rock 'n' Roll--had actually worked out? The Lennon of this stage of his life was even willing to perform a Beatles song live, thanks to the prompting of Elton John; who knows what this alternative future might have held?

Well, whether or not any new Lennon-McCartney compositions would have been possible along that road untaken, the compositions in Walls and Bridges deserve respect. "Going Down on Love" is a groovy song about sex with lyrics that are all about unfulfillment; its balance between giggling winks and self-pity is classic Lennon. I actually don't love "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night," despite it being John's only American #1; Bobby Keys's saxophone is terrific, of course, but all those horns just make me think of bandleader G.E. Smith opening an episode of "Saturday Night Live." "Old Dirt Road," "What You Got," "Scared," and "#9 Dream" are all first-rate pop songs, in turns moody, atmospheric, driving, and/or head-poppingly good. It's not all great, to be sure; "Steel and Glass" is just a retread of Lennon trademarked vituperation, and I think "Bless You," though apparently Lennon's favorite track on the album, is just sappy. (By contrast, Lennon, after he reconciled with Ono, labeled "Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)," his love song to May Pang, as "just a piece of garbage," but I think it's okay, certainly no worse than a dozen other middling Beatles love songs.) "Beef Jerky" is a fun instrumental, much better than some of the pointless noodling on earlier Lennon albums. And "Nobody Loves You," while perhaps not a masterpiece on the level of "Imagine" or "Jealous Guy," absolutely shoots for those heights, and is a worthy competitor.

Walls and Bridges gets a high B, maybe even a B+. This is a really solid piece of work, better than anything he'd done in the previous three years. I don't know if direct comparisons are applicable, but if we sit my rankings of Lennon's and McCartney's solo discographies side by side, and note that it took McCartney five albums before he finally produced Band on the Run, Lennon's talent might be edging poor Macca aside.

Listening to Lennon #4: Mind Games

Mind Games is usually seen as Lennon backing away from the direct, seemingly (but in actual fact almost never truly) spontaneous engagement with radical and counter-cultural politics and street life that characterized Some Time in New York City, and there's clearly a lot of truth to that take. If nothing else, it fits with Lennon's trajectory in early 1973. He was fighting efforts to deport him from the United States, and thus found it necessary to make himself less of an anti-American lightning rod, and Richard Nixon's re-election to the presidency in 1972--Lennon had strongly affirmed his support for George McGovern--had left him thoroughly depressed and falling back into sexual and chemical addiction and dissolution (not that he'd ever really escaped such, anyway). By the summer of 1973, Lennon and Ono had formally (if not officially) separated, and Lennon was spending most of his time in Los Angeles--the beginning of his infamous "Lost Weekend." But before he left New York, however temporarily, he poured out thoughts and ideas into a new album, writing all the songs in a week's time (though some of the basic tunes he's worked on here and there for years), getting the recording and mixing done--he produced the album himself--in a little less than two months. After more than a year of benefit concerts and political appearances and no new music, this was in some sense a return to form for Lennon, though his "form" was far from at its best. 

Mind Games, while it has its defenders, is also often seen as an aimless, unfocused album, and there's truth to that as well. I actually think it's helpful to think of the album in terms of its original vinyl: the album's A side is actually pretty strong, while the B side is mostly perfunctory at best. I really love the sumptuous, Phil Spector-inspired arrangement for the album's lead single, "Mind Games"; its lyrical substance is slight and hippy-dippy (Lennon was busy pursuing another guru, this time the psychologists Robert Masters and Jean Houston, two key players in the quasi-mystical "human potential movement"), but the resulting recording is wonderfully dreamy, and Lennon's vocal is terrific. "Tight A$," by contrast, is a solid, fun rockabilly song. And the album's stand-out, I think, is "Bring on the Lucie (Freda People)," a rambunctious yet melodic tune whose sharp lyrics and clever political allusions really ought to put it on the same level of Lennon's much more famous "Power to the People" or "Give Peace a Chance." ("Lucie," by the way, is apparently "Lucifer," if you're wondering.) Put those along with "Intuition"--the first song on the B side, a surprisingly McCartney-style pop tune, with its infectious rhythm, its upbeat lyrics, and its jaunty, half-baked vibe--and you have an impressive musical collection, especially coming from someone struggling through depression and an admittedly justified paranoia. Why none of them were released as radio singles besides "Mind Games" I don't understand.

I'm not sure anything else on the album is worth more than an occasional listen, though. "Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)" is a sincere, self-confessional ballad, but whatever the value of continually repenting for one's faults may be, as a musician Lennon is repeating his processing of emotions here in a way that he'd already done much better on Imagine. "One Day (At A Time)" has its fans, and I admit Lennon's high-register vocal is kind of distinctive, but the same could be said for the mellow, steel guitar sound of "You Are Here," the hand-claps of "Only People," or the fine guitar work on "I Know (I Know)"--all are solid but not particularly captivating introspective tunes about love. I'll give credit to "Out the Blue," though--the lyrics there are occasionally bonkers, but maybe that's reflective of Lennon really trying to be original in expressing his conflicted yet enduring feelings for Yoko, similarly running through multiple styles in putting together this genuinely moving and fun ballad. And the aggressive boogie of "Meat City," the album's concluding track, can really get your head bopping, even if it veers into the same "just-jamming" problem that afflicted so much of Some Time in New York City.

So even with Lennon messed up and aimless, his artistry shone through, sufficient to put together on short notice a pretty decent rock and roll album. I give it a B-. Nowhere near his best work, but the greatness is still there, sometimes. 

Listening to Lennon #3: Some Time in New York City

In August of 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York City, according to them to help Yoko obtain custody of her daughter Kyoko (which was a failure; Kyoko's father Anthony Cox, who had been awarded custody of Kyoko in his divorce from Yoko, kept Kyoko hidden from Yoko for more than 20 years), and also to escape the tabloid attention they attracted everywhere they went (though considering how effectively they cultivated and made use of that attention, that explanation seems questionable). In any case, they never left, with Lennon himself existing in legal limbo, fighting attempts to deport him for five years before finally achieving his green card and permanent residency in 1976. Lennon had been to America before, but only with the Beatles; now, he was living in what he considered to be the finest, freest, most fun city in the world, and artistically he was all on his own. And with the release of "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" in December of that year, he was the toast of the city's radical chic establishment. What was he going to do?

Unfortunately, what he decided to--with an excitement that is audible on every track of the album--is knock out a bunch of loose, rough recordings with Yoko, titled Some Time in New York City. It's probably the worst reviewed single album that John and Yoko ever worked on together. Most of the songs on it were written and recorded hurriedly (the whole album was finished by March 1972), with the divided aim to appeal to the hippie counter-culture audience that, ever since "Give Peace a Chance" in 1969, John had ingratiated himself to, as well as to present Yoko's artistic perspective, something that sometimes seems identical to that counter-culture, but other times presents itself as somehow above and condescending to it. For a backing band, Lennon chose a short-lived, hard-partying bar band, Elephant's Memory, which had been playing around Greenwich Village for a while (they provided two tracks to 1969's Midnight Cowboy), but did last very long beyond their collaboration with John and Yoko.

One thing you can say for Elephant's Memory, though: they could jam, and for several singles on this album, aimless jamming is all Lennon had in mind."Attica State" and "John Sinclair" both have the lyrical seeds of decent protest folk or rock songs, but the music goes nowhere (despite some really great blues licks and slide guitar on the latter tune). The solo Ono compositions--"Sisters, O Sisters," "Born in a Prison," and "We're all Water"--all have a slightly better musical structure; there's a fun, girl-group energy to the first of those, and an off-kilter rollicking quality to the last. If their lyrics--and Ono's wailing vocals--hadn't alternated between being pretentious and ridiculous, I could imagine either becoming a slumber-party anthem or bus-trip favorite. No such luck though. (As for "Born in a Prison,"the less said about that the better.)

The Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, Ireland, on January 30, 1972, inspired two songs: "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "The Luck of the Irish." The first is rambunctious and angry, and works well enough, except for Ono's dirge-like singing of the chorus. The second is smarter, reflecting both Lennon's dark, sarcastic sensibility as well as his winking smirk; the lyrics include both the vicious "Why the hell are the English there anyway? / As they kill with God on their side!" and the giggling "Let's walk over rainbows like leprechauns / The world would be one big Blarney Stone." And Ono's vocals are actually pretty well controlled on that track. They both lack any kind of overall unity, though; they definitely aren't the equal, at least as far as their musical production is concerned, to McCartney's own response to Bloody Sunday, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" from Wild Life, and that's admittedly kind of a low bar.

What's left? "Angela," a quiet duet and tribute to Angela Davis that has a nice enough tune, but whose lyrics and vocal are just cloying. "New York City," by contrast, is an open-ended and overflowing celebration of Lennon's new home. The only song on the album attributed solely to himself, it weaves together terrific electric guitar work and a pulsing saxophone sound. It's the album's one unqualified success; when Lennon shouts "The Statue of Liberty said 'Come!'," you can feel it. "Woman is the Nigger of the World" is actually even better musically; it has a great melody and polished, forceful rock beat. But the subject matter and lyrics are just utterly mis-matched to the music. Lennon was apparently off hard drugs at this time, so you just have to solely credit his immense arrogance and obliviousness when sings, as part of a thundering, raving, enthusiastic, heartfelt chorus "Woman is the slave to the slaves!" I mean, full points for your feminist strivings, John (Ono actually came up with the title of the song), but honestly, what were you thinking?

Some Time in New York City gets a D+; "New York City," and the overall energy of the backing band, prevents me from giving it a D. Hope John will do better--and keep Yoko away from the mic--next time out the gate. 

Listening to Lennon #2: Imagine

By the spring of 1971, Lennon's confused mess of anger, resentment, and frustration had a focus: his oldest and truest friend, Paul McCartney. Macca's own frustrations had led him to sue the Beatles as an organization in order to force a break-up of the legal entanglements that were, in his view, preventing any of them from moving forward either artistically or financially. This had, obviously, infuriated the other Beatles, with his formal announcement that The Beatles were no more--something that Lennon had made clear nearly a year and half earlier but which the band had agreed to keep quiet--compounding the (not inaccurate) controlling image they'd developed of Paul. And then there was the release of McCartney's second solo album, Ram which (deservedly) enjoyed much more commercial success than did his first, and which (undeservedly) generated immense ire on the part of John, mostly due to "Too Many People," a song with a couple of Lennon-aimed snarks that was, as I wrote before about this slight but enjoyable album, "probably about as close as McCartney can ever get to building up righteous indignation." So as Lennon went into the studio, similarly determined to make his second solo album less artistic and more accessible, he did so with at least one additional goal--give it to Paul McCartney but good. But he didn't get around to that until most of the way through the album.

Imagine is most famous, of course, for its masterful title track, which opens the album. Some people will go to their deathbeds insisting that they hate "Imagine" or at least find it vapid or saccharine or somehow quasi-totalitarian, but I think these people are being driven political hang-ups, whether they acknowledge them or not. Yes, lyrically the song is ponderous and self-important--and this is where the Yoko Ono haters note her influence on the song--but its melody is sweet, its piano gorgeous, and its overall vibe, weighted by over a half-century of invocations, is exactly what album producer Phil Spector aimed for it to be: anthemic. Steve Martin has gotten 15 years worth of laughs out of his gag number "Atheists Don't Have No Songs," but of course Lennon proved him wrong decades before. "Imagine" is a damn hymn, a reverent paean to a worldview that has moved tens of millions, and must be respected as such.

It's not, I think, the best or most beautiful song on the album though. For that, I would nominate "Jealous Guy," which is just an astonishing gem, one I'd never really listened to over all the decades (the decision not to release it as a single was a crime). I can see the argument that the song's lush, haunting arrangement is overproduced, but to my ear the strings and percussion are properly placed in the background of Lennon's vocal, which is, in my opinion, equal to any of his best Beatles ballads, like "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" or "Dear Prudence." And lyrically it's fascinating: obviously autobiographical, yet also open-ended. Ian Leslie, writing in John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, is convinced (mostly by the whistling break in the song; he sees that as a give-away) that while Lennon was, thanks to the intensive therapy he'd subjected himself to, plainly thinking about Yoko, he was probably also thinking about Paul. McCartney himself agrees, or at least did at one time; Leslie quotes him in his book: "In the end, I think John had some tough breaks. He used to say 'Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon.' He wrote 'I'm Just a Jealous Guy,' and he said that the song was about me." I don't know if I believe that, but I want to.

So two absolutely great, and eminently listenable songs on this album; what else? "Crippled Inside," another obvious product of Lennon's therapy, is to my mind a spiritual cousin to McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," a song with lyrics spelling out interior ugliness while being accompanied by a delightfully jaunty--in this case rockabilly rather than musical hall--tune. "It's So Hard" is a short, solid blues song, perhaps a little too prettified by the album's production, but worth listening to a time or three. The propulsive beat of  "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don't Want to Die" hides the fact that the song is as underdeveloped as any of Macca's lazier tunes; Lennon's just vamping here. The same can be said for "Gimme Some Truth." "How" is a perfectly fine love ballad, though after listening to it over and over, I'm convinced McCartney stole from it for "So Bad" on Pipes of Peace. By contrast "Oh My Love," which Lennon co-wrote with Yoko (he actually acknowledged her contribution on this song, unlike on others), is a genuinely searching and loving song, with George Harrison's gentle guitar accenting Lennon's voice wonderfully. And the final track, "Oh Yoko!," is a head-popping, hand-clapping charmer, a bright and hopeful tune with a harmonica finale that finishes off the album excellently.

What did I skip? "How Do You Sleep?," of course. What do say about this musically compelling, lyrically embarrassing song? It's a huge, burning, sweeping number, funky and intense in its groove; with a better subject matter it might have been one of Lennon's greatest recordings. But as it is, this awesome musical set-up just perversely provides listeners with a bunch of cheap shots. Some of the lines are admittedly quite sharp ("The sound you make is Muzak to my ears / You must have learned something in all those years"), but mostly what Lennon spilled out about his former songwriting partner was childish and mean. (It's not to George Harrison's credit that he got into the recording with such gusto; one the other hand, it is to Ringo Starr's credit that, when he stopped by the studio, he was nonplussed by it all, and told John it was time to stop.) John later dismissed the song, and apparently Paul was able to get past it as well. Again, Leslie situates the song in John and Paul's long, complicated relationship, quoting Lennon as simply stating that "How Do You Sleep?" actually "isn't about Paul. It's about me."

How to rank Imagine? It's better than Plastic Ono Band, though not by leaps and bounds. The best stuff on it is some truly world-class pop music; the worst stuff on it drags it down. I give it an A-; a genuinely great album, but not quite as great as it could have been.

Listening to Lennon #1: Plastic Ono Band

So, as promised, my review of Lennon's solo albums begins.

By January of 1970, the last time the Beatles ever worked together as "The Beatles" was more than four months in the past. Lennon had been divorced from his first wife Cynthia for over a year, and he'd been married to Yoko for nearly one; he'd also recorded and released two big solo hit records, "Give Peace a Chance" and "Cold Turkey," and was working on a third, "Instant Karma," which would do even better on the charts than either of the previous two. He'd cut his hair short, he and Yoko had (for the moment) quit heroin, and he'd long since privately told his fellow Beatles that the band was over, though they'd all agreed not to make any public announcement. Through all this, it's not clear what the end of the Beatles meant for John; in interviews while he and Yoko were traveling Europe and then again when "Instant Karma" came out, he'd talk about how what was ending wasn't so much a band as an "image," and that the current confusion as to the direction of the band might easily be a "rebirth." Lennon seemed happy--which was always a difficult thing to determine with him, but the signs were there.

But then the spring of 1970 brought Paul's release of his first solo album, McCartney (honestly, I don't think it's very good), triggering John's defensive, jealous spirit; Paul's incredibly ill-conceived (however frustratingly justified) promotional interview which was taken as a public declaration that the Beatles were finished, which John saw as a presumptuous betrayal; the release of both Let It Be the album and Let It Be the documentary film, with its (incorrectly!) depressing take on the "Get Back" sessions that produced both of the above, and the latter of which reduced John to tears when he saw it; and, finally, John's discovery, in March, of the psychotherapist and wanna-be guru Arthur Janov, whose book The Primal Scream convinced Lennon--a man who, as Rob Sheffield put in in Dreaming the Beatles, had always been "deeply attracted to conversion experiences and renunciation scenes"--that he desperately needed to scream his way out of his problems, his frustrations, his abiding and confusing hates and regrets. He and Ono spent four months, in London and Los Angeles, going through Janov's therapy. In the meantime, Yoko miscarried, Lennon turned 30, and had a terrible row with the father who had abandoned him as a child, whom he never saw again after his birthday. I'm hardly the first to say that you can't make sense of Lennon's first solo album, Plastic Ono Band (his name for the floating line-up of musicians that played with him and Yoko) without considering all of this.

So the entire album is a work of therapy? Not quite; there are a couple of songs on it that could have been developed in any context. "Love" is a sweet, stripped-down tune, with Lennon's voice stretching to sing lyrics as sappy as anything Macca ever wrote (I mean, "Love is asking / To be loved"?), while "Look at Me" is a polished if rather plain ditty that had its roots in something Lennon was working on way back in India in 1968. But besides those, every song on Plastic Ono Band, to one degree or another, is an explicit expression or a reflection of John's resentments, his immaturities, his angers, his fears. "Working Class Hero" is a masterful political statement, a perfectly tight bit of quiet, controlled folky fury, which Lennon apparently obsessed over more than any other song on the album. "Hold On" is more an idea than a fleshed out song, but his use of tremolo, complemented by Ringo's superb drumming, makes it seem like genuine moment of hope in the midst of comprehensive despair. "I Found Out" and "Well Well Well" are both darkly bitter, pulsing, insistent songs of righteous indignation and John's shouting, all about making do and living life despite the betrayal of others. "Remember" and "Isolation" are both full of dissonances and rhythmic shifts; they're worth pairing together, though the sadness of the first is staccato and accusatory, and on the second its bluesy and reflective. I think they're all pretty solid tunes, however inseparable they are from the album's overall vibe.

That just leaves Plastic Ono Band's bookends, "Mother" and "God" (leaving aside the creepy, brief, monotone "My Mummy's Dead" ditty at the album's conclusion). "Mother" is the fullest artistic work on Plastic Ono Band, I think, and really is kind of a masterpiece of raw, musically expressed pain; his repeated, increasing hoarse cries at the end--"Mama don't go; Daddy come home!"--deepen and propel the song towards its conclusion. "God," though, is odd. It's an artfully arranged but sing-songy incantation, a kind of anti-mantra; if it wasn't for the tremendous combination of Billy Preston's gorgeous piano and Ringo's furiously controlled drumming, the whole thing would sound kind of petulant. Or at least I think that--but then, I've never been famous, and there's basically no chance I or anyone else who reads this will ever be remotely as famous as Lennon was. So maybe I've no place to say that his plaintive concluding lines--"I don't believe in Beatles....I was the walrus / but now I'm John. / And so, dear friends, / you'll just have to carry on. / The dream is over."--don't deserve the ponderousness he delivered them with. Like I said before, the end of the Beatles was huge--and to the extent that John was considered by many the Beatles' wounded artistic muse--thanks in no small part to John spending the first years after the break-up constantly telling himself and everyone else that--his pronouncements in "God" perhaps deserve all the respect they received. (As far as I'm concerned, though, the best thing about "God" is that it inspired Bono to write "God Part II," a mostly forgotten track from Rattle and Hum which is, I think, the best rock tune U2 ever recorded.)

I give Plastic Ono Band a solid B, maybe even a B+; it's better as a personal artistic document than as an album of popular music, but it's not entirely lacking in the latter. It'll be interesting to see if I decide that Lennon ever did better than this dark but mostly compelling first solo album of his.

Regarding John (and Paul, and the Beatles too, but Mostly John)

Paul McCartney has been my favorite Beatle for years, as the long journey I took in 2019 through Macca's then-nearly-50-years' worth of solo, non-Beatles recordings should prove. The man is simply incredible, as a musician, performer, arranger, and instrumentalist. He's got an uncanny ear for melody, and his elastic appreciation of different sounds and styles, along with his incredible (however inconsistent) work ethic, has meant that he's built songs for decades that demonstrate a mastery, or at least a partial mastery, of the capaciousness of pop music. I can't think of any English-speaking artist besides Bob Dylan whose influence on popular music in the 20th century (and more!) can compare with Sir Paul, and it frustrates me to no end that while I was able to finally catch the former in concert, I've probably missed my chance to ever see the latter. 

But all that said, after recently reading Ian Leslie's tremendous John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, I found myself thinking: have I, perhaps in kind of a perverse refusal of the worship of John Lennon which I saw all around me in pop culture as a young person in the 1980s, purposefully underplayed the role John played in making Paul the musician he became? As a pop radio kid, I was vaguely learning who the Beatles were at a very young age--and yet out of any of them, it was the groovy hits that McCartney put out that I learned first, and that perhaps overshadowed whatever else I was picking up. Despite being a news addict from elementary school on, I actually have no memory of the announcement of Lennon's murder in December 1980 (just before I turned 12). Instead what I remember was the endless reminiscences of him, on every station and in every publication, for months if not years afterward (a sad scene about how devastating many found his murder even showed up in one of my Moon Knight comic books). Perhaps all that--no doubt combined with the anti-hippie vibes that weren't too hard to find in the conservative Mormon milieu I was raised in--made me inclined to just not take John seriously.

If I did, that's a huge mistake, not just because Lennon is an artist worth reckoning with, but because it undermines my own understanding of  McCartney. As all the very biographies of Paul I read confirmed (indeed, how I even noted here when talking about Peter Jackson's Get Back), John's relationship with, his competition with, and his collaboration with Paul is probably incalculable in terms of how they all contributed to Paul's musical genius. I'm not saying the world wouldn't have known Paul McCartney if the 17-year-old John Lennon hadn't have captivated him and then, upon sizing up the 15-year-old Paul's audition for him, invited him to join his group The Quarry Men when they first met in the summer of 1957; I think Paul is just too protean an artistic force to have been kept down by any circumstance or lack thereof. But without his older friend's wit, his anger, his arrogance and his neediness, his mix of idealism and cynicism, and most of all his friendship? Black 47's Larry Kirwan once wrote a play--"Liverpool Fantasy"--that imagined an alternative history where the Beatles hadn't made it (in Kirwan's imagination they broke up, tellingly, because John quit the group when they seemed ready to acquiesce--as did actually happen--to studio demands for them to play something other the rock and roll John was devoted to at their very first recording session in 1962). While Kirwan presented John, George, and Ringo as all still living in Liverpool, Paul wasn't; by the play's imagined 1986, he'd become a massive American pop superstar, singing in Las Vegas and cranking out heavily orchestrated, disposable hits under the name "Paul Montana." I think that's a little cruel, a fiction that leans too hard into the mostly (but only mostly) false image of Paul as a crowd-pleasing, superficial hit-making machine. But still: any honest reckoning with Paul's history and accomplishment simply cannot due without considering what John's drives and hang-ups and delights and hatreds helped make him into.

So that's what I'm going to do for the rest of 2025: listen to John Lennon's solo music--all of it--closely, and see what I think, and how I can put it together with my understanding of the life he led, and what that understanding of Lennon's aspirations and accomplishments says to me. This will be an easier task than what I did with Paul; for one thing, with his life tragically ended 45 years ago, John had far less time than Paul has had to build up a musical library to explore. Thanks to the same friend who encouraged and enabled me to do my deep dive into McCartney's music back in 2019, I have available to me remastered recordings of all eight of Lennon's post-Beatles albums (yes, that means I'm skipping over the three avant-garde albums of experimental music that he and Yoko Ono produced in 1968 and 1969), plus a collection of Lennon's officially released non-album singles and various studio outtakes and home recordings. I'll review and reflect upon one of those albums each month, May through December. For today though, some random thoughts about and reviews of that catch-all collection first.

The singles portion of John Lennon: Singles and Home Tapes consists of six songs, all of which are terrific. This isn't surprising; they all were, after all, studio recordings that the engineers and record company people and John himself all thought worthy of an independent release, and whatever may or may not be said about any of those others, Lennon himself, whatever his limitations as an instrumentalist or solo songwriter, had a deep, intuitive grasp of both the zeitgeist and of American rock and roll as it enraptured him as a teenager in the 1950s--he knew what worked (usually, anyway). Three of the singles are first-rate expressions of that rock and roll sensibility; of the others, one is among the greatest popular Christmas songs written and recorded in the past century, and two more are inseparable from the equally idealistic and simplistic (and "commercializable," if that's a word) peacenik movement of the late 1960s; to criticize them on the level of songmanship, as opposed to the sing-along tunes of protest they were purposefully designed to be, is to misunderstand completely what Lennon, as guided and shaped by his new love and wife Yoko, had determined himself to become. Which is not to say they should be criticized. On the contrary, whether or not they're world-class musical art, the truth is that even John's hippie singles provide more than adequate proof that, at its best, John's talent--mixed up as it was with his anger with himself and the status quo, his deep insecurity about his own accomplishments and relationships, his double-minded contempt for (but also longing for) intellectual and artistic pretension, and his often messianic idealism--could nonetheless still create great music, even without his greatest friend, rival, and partner at his side (or looking over his shoulder).

"Give Peace a Chance," the last of the six on the "Singles" disc, was the first one recorded, in a Montreal hotel room during John and Yoko's "Bed-In" in the summer of 1969, with dozens of hippie hanger-ons and luminaries (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, Tommy Smothers, etc.) clapping and singing along; the second to last on the disc, "Move Over Ms. L," was the latest one recorded, from John's drug-addled "Lost Weekend" period in Los Angeles in 1974, a short and quick, delightfully innocent, mostly nonsense rocker, that shows that all hallucinogenics in the world couldn't stop Lennon from approximating Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins when he had a mind to do so. It's my favorite song out of the whole collection, to be honest; comparable to some of the very best of McCartney's straightforward solo pop, I think. I can't listen to it and not think of the rocking gem from the Beatles' rooftop concert, "One After 909," where John and Paul's love for each other and the rock and roll music which made them who they were is just overflowing.

As for the rest, "Cold Turkey," a bluesy hard rock tune, also from 1969, features Eric Clapton on guitar, and would have been a perfect fit with The White Album's "Revolution" (the single version, not the album one), or when Lennon performed "Yer Blues" with Clapton and Keith Richards as The Dirty Mac in 1968. "Power to the People," from 1971, is a strong, quasi-R&B song that no doubt often fired up crowds during anti-war protests back in the day, with Bobby Keys, the Texas saxophone wonder who went on to power so many classic Rolling Stones tunes--and whom I was lucky enough to see perform live back in 2009--giving this song much of its oomph. "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)," from 1970, is a pulsing, insistent number, with the sound just rushing at the listener from almost the first beat; it's not surprising that Phil Spector was in the recording studio for that one. And who can criticize 1971's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)"? Sure, self-conscious 19th-century traditionalists can, and so can Christians who insist that not centering the Biblical story in every holiday song is some kind of crime. But other than those sticks-in-the-mud, it's hard to imagine finding any sincere fault with the tune. Lennon managed in this song to channel the spirit of the season in a musically simple, politically pointed, historically grounded, yet entirely inviting and open-ended way. Most other songwriters never come close to that level of accomplishment, and John, in 1971, was still just getting started.

The "Home Tapes" disc of the collection is a mixed bag. It's interesting to hear early and alternate takes of such songs as "Mother," "God," and "Beautiful Boy," but they can't compare to the official album tracks--though perhaps, as I work my way through the albums themselves, I'll change my mind. For now, I think the only track that truly makes it worth owning is the solo piano version it contains of the unreleased "Serve Yourself" (a track that exists in many bootlegged versions, some of them exceptionally profane). I don't consider it a particularly good song--but then, I'm biased, as I consider Dylan's Christian albums mostly strong and powerful music, and the specific song that Lennon found infuriating and was inspired to respond to--"Gotta Serve Somebody"--a masterpiece for both gospel and rock and roll. Lennon didn't agree, unsurprisingly. Which is okay; John followed his own path, one that was tragically cut short far too early. For the rest of the year, I'm going to follow it the best I can.

Leslie's Love Story in Songs, and Ours Too.

Ian Leslie's John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is a terrific book. I say that as a major Beatles fan, though not, as I've confessed before, a fanatic. I may have collected and listened to everything Paul McCartney has ever officially released, but I haven't done the same with John Lennon (much less George Harrison or Ringo Starr), and that's a failure on my part. Particularly when it comes to John, I need to correct that someday. 

Why? Because as I think Leslie demonstrates very well in this book, constructing any history of the Lennon & McCartney musical partnership--both before and after the Beatles--which doesn't put their complicated, deeply loving, often deeply resentful, and always deeply confusing relationship at the center almost certainly misses something crucial. That's not to say Leslie does something here that has never been done before; any remotely attentive take on the lives of these two individuals--or at least their lives between 1957 and 1980, and the art they made during those years, both together and apart and with others--can't help but notice how much John and Paul, no matter what else is going on or who else is there, are looking at and to one another, seeking approval from the other, trying to one-up one another, listening to and trusting in each other. I took that away as perhaps the defining revelation of Peter Jackson's wonderful reconstruction of the Let It Be sessions, The Beatles: Get Back, and I know I'm not alone in thinking that way.

But Leslie provides the supporting evidence of the abiding artistic importance of all of John and Paul's looking, listening, seeking, competing, and trusting. Some of the songs he builds chapters around are, admittedly, a bit of stretch; he tells the story of these two artists chronologically, and finding the right song from the particular stretch of their lives he is chronicling (sometimes just a few weeks, sometimes several months) to match what he wants to say about respective artistic and personal as well as their relationship's evolution(s) doesn't always work. But there were so many times when the product of the Lennon & McCartney songwriting partnership reflected exactly what appears to have been going on in their hearts and heads that, more often than not, the songs Leslie chooses for each chapter work very well, sometimes perfectly. (I'll never think about "If I Fell" or "In My Life" or Lennon's "God" the same way again--and it's not a coincidence that these were all John songs: while Leslie's admiration for Paul is endless, he makes a strong case that the brilliant and damaged John was always the force that did more to captivate or infuriate or drive forward Paul as an artist, and the Beatles as a band, than was the case for any other single member.)

Anyway, this is a first-rate work of both popular biography and musical criticism; I have to set it alongside Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles as the best book I've ever read about that band, despite its limitations (he puts an official apology at the end of the book, expressing regret that, because of his thesis--as defensible and correct as I think it is--George Harrison and Ringo Starr get pushed aside). Check it out, if you're any kind of fan of the 1960s at all; you're learn something from it, and maybe be inspired by it too.

80 Macca Years, 80 Favorite Macca Songs

Today, Sir Paul McCartney turns 80 years old. A few publications and websites, in honor of this milestone, are listing, or asking other artists to list, 80 out of the hundreds (thousands?) of songs Macca has written over the past 65 years or so that they particularly like. Well, I figured I'm a Beatles fan, and I spent a year listening to everything McCartney has ever recorded post-Beatles, so why can't I do the same? So here is my work of an evening: 80 songs written by Paul McCartney, in alphabetical order, that I think everyone should know (though it just so happens that the list ends with my single all-time favorite McCartney composition and Beatles song). Enjoy or criticize or ignore, as you feel inclined.

"All My Loving" (1963)
"Another Day" (1970)
"Band on the Run" (1973)
"Beware My Love" (1976)
"Biker Like an Icon" (1993)
"Blackbird" (1968)
"Call Me Back Again" (1975)
"Calico Skies" (1997)
"Can't Buy Me Love" (1964)
"Come On to Me" (2018)
"Coming Up" (1980)
"Dominoes" (2018)
"Drive My Car" (1965)
"Ebony and Ivory" (1982)
"The End of the End" (2007)
"Eleanor Rigby" (1966)
"English Tea" (2005)
"Figure of Eight" (1989)
"Fool on the Hill" (1967)
"For No One" (1966)
"Get on the Right Thing" (1973)
"Get Back" (1970)
"Getting Better" (1967)
"Goodnight Tonight" (1979)
"Got to Get You into My Life" (1966)
"Happy With You" (2018)
"Helter Skelter" (1968)
"Here Today" (1982)
"Here There Everywhere" (1966)
"Hey Hey" (1983)
"Hey Jude" (1968)
"House of Wax" (2007)
"I Can Bet" (2013)
"I Don't Know" (2018)
"I'm Looking Through You" (1965)
"I'll Follow the Sun" (1964)
"I Saw Her Standing There" (1963)
"I've Just Seen a Face" (1965)
"Jet" (1973)
"Junior's Farm" (1974)
"Lady Madonna" (1968)
"Let 'Em In" (1976)
"Let It Be" (1970)
"Let Me Roll It" (1973)
"Listen to What the Man Said" (1975)
"Long and Winding Road" (1970)
"Lovely Rita" (1967)
"Live and Let Die" (1973)
"Magneto and Titanium Man" (1975)
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer" (1969)
"Maybe I'm Amazed" (1970)
"Michelle" (1965)
"Mother Nature's Sun" (1968)
"Mull of Kintyre" (1977)
"My Brave Face" (1989)
"Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five" (1973)
"No More Lonely Nights" (1984)
"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" (1968)
"Oh! Darling" (1969)
"Paperback Writer" (1966)
"Peace in the Neighborhood" (1993)
"Penny Lane" (1967)
"Pretty Boys" (2020)
"Queenie Eye" (2013)
"Riding to Vanity Fair" (2005)
"Rocky Raccoon" (1968)
"She's Leaving Home" (1967)
"Sing the Changes" (2008)
"Smile Away" (1971)
"Sun is Shining" (2008)
"Take It Away" (1982)
"Too Many People" (1971)
"Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" (1971)
"Wanderlust" (1982)
"We Got Married" (1989)
"What's That You're Doing?" (1982)
"When I'm Sixty-Four" (1967)
"With a Little Luck" (1978)
"Yesterday" (1965)
"You Won't See Me" (1965)