#132, "I'll Follow The Sun," The Beatles (1964)

150 Favorite Songs: #132, "I'll Follow The Sun," The Beatles (1964)

This is the only Beatles song I put on the list. I like lots of Beatles songs, of course—who doesn't? But they also don't sound like much of anything to me anymore. They're so ingrained in our culture, and in my own life personally, that it's really hard to feel a personal connection to "Hey Jude" or "Come Together" or "Let It Be."

My dad was a Beatles fan in that big way, the way that made them seem like mythical figures, like they were separate and distinct from bands, like they weren’t just four young people who met each other and played songs together and got famous doing it. I grew up thinking of them as, like, faces on Mount Rushmore or Greek gods, and their music always seemed weightier than I was always willing to carry, as a result. For years, his birthday and Christmas gifts were Beatles-themed (if they weren’t Muhammad Ali-themed, another figure in his personal pantheon and thus the pantheon I grew up understanding as less of a person and more of a myth; also on that list was Secretariat, which is funny because he was a horse). Eventually, one year, he had to actively request that we cool it with the Beatles stuff. And so the Beatles songs, while so many of them are great, just feel like they’re outside of the things I can fit inside myself. It’d be like if someone asked you what your favorite thing is, and you said “air.” Yes, true, valid! But it’s hard to have a strong feeling about it.

"I'll Follow The Sun" is my one exception, and it's probably just because it's fairly obscure, at least as far as Beatles songs go. It's one of their earliest songs—it was on Beatles For Sale, but is much older than that, dating back to the Quarrymen days—and it's just very pretty, and wears its melancholy in a way that feels very natural. I think I must have found this when I was 11 or 12, right before I started to really care about music. There was a radio show where we lived called "Breakfast With The Beatles" on Sundays that my dad would listen to, and since we didn't have much money for Father's Day presents or things like that, I would try to tape songs I liked from it and give him the tape when I was finished—because he didn't have enough chances to hear Beatles songs, right?

"I'll Follow The Sun" stuck out to me, because the way it phrases the chorus—"And though I lose a friend / in the end you will know"—just sounded very poignant to me. Life moves on, losing friends is a painful enough thing that you might write songs about it, but also common enough that you're willing to do it when the time has come. It's an even-keeled approach to the end of a relationship, and that's always appealed to me. I'm sure it's not the greatest song the Beatles wrote, or even the one that expresses its ideas in the most elegant manner. But a song like this one—it sounds like what I imagine the Beatles would sound like to our ears these days if they weren't The Beatles, with the weight and burden that entails. It's a really good early 60's sad British pop song from some band. It's nice to hear the Beatles that way.