While playing songs tonight

I just happened to look up the tab for "I'll Be Back" ("You know, if you break my heart I'll go...") and after marveling at what fluent, imaginative, and addictive songwriters John and Paul (and George) became after, what, less than five years together? And they went on for at least another three years only getting more amazingly good. It's my boomer chauvinism showing through, but I'll say that the Beatles are, to me, the gold standard for pop music after rock became its dominant form. A metric I originally developed for Big Star applies equally to their Liverpool inspirations: count the number of hooks in their song: the verse, the refrain, the bridge, the guitar parts, the bass part. You wind up humming every single one of them.

And hanging out with Tom and Keely and Alan and Vida and Eden remind me of another thing: kids adore Beatles songs, and you and they singing those songs together is more fun than grownups should be allowed to have.