Anodyne

Photo: Linda McCartney

After 9/11 people used anodyne of different kinds to escape. My current escape is the 2-volume, 20-pound collection of lyrics and photographs, Paul McCartney, THE LYRICS. Taken as a whole, you have to realize that Beatles are a part of the postwar zeitgeist, and if history repeats or rhymes, there will be another Beatles, perhaps in the 2040s. There's always some kind of Postwar, i.e. all the stuff that gets created in the the new Golden Age.

Song titles can be trigger points, even though they aren't about war per se, but some obviously are about conflict, give the bitter aftertastes of the Beatles' break up, to wit, the story behind Dear Friend, seemingly driven by envy:

"...I'd been largely quiet about John and the Beatles split-up in the press....John accused me of announcing the Beatles break-up to promote the McCartney album... John would say things like, "It was rubbish...." and it hurt...I"m thinking, "Why he would say that?" Are you annoyed at me or or are you jealous or what?"

or...

"Sting once said to me that Let It Be wasn't a good choice for me to sing at Live Aid. He thought it was implicit that action was required, and that leaving well enough alone wasn't an appropriate message on the occasion of the huge call-to-action that Live Aid represented. But Let It Be isn't about being complacent or complicit. It's about having a sense of a complete picture about being reassigned to the global view. The context in which the song was written was one of stress. It was a difficult time because we were heading towards the breakup of The Beatles. It was a period of change partly because John and Yoko got together, and that had an effect on the dynamics of the group."

Trigger Titles: 

Back in the USSR
Carry That Weight
Despite Repeated Warnings
Distractions
Do It Now
Dress Me Up as a Robber
The End
Get Back
Helter Skelter
Let It Be
Live and Let Die
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five
Pipes of Peace
Tug of War 

Inflection points create new meaning that wasn't there initially. This is why it's not always necessary to intentionally make political art or social commentary because existing work can be re-contextualized in the future. Songwriting is about this as well: you're always drawing from things within the sphere of consciousness, even decades later.

On the inspiration for Let It Be:

"One interesting thing about Let It Be that I was reminded of only recently is that, while I was studying English literature at the Liverpool Institute High School For Boys with my favorite teacher, I read Hamlet. In those days you had to learn speeches by heart because you had to be able to carry them into the exam and quote them. There are a couple of lines from late in the play":

O, I could tell you -
But let it be, - Horatio, I am dead 

Then of course there's Back in the U.S.S.R.:

The Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the West behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Georgia's always on my mind 

But obviously those Ukraine girls then are now elderly and forced to flee what was left of the West in Ukraine. In the book there is also a photo of McCartney playing in Red Square in May 2003, amid the invasion of Iraq by the US. Very ironic.

To the extent that the current conflict is essentially a conflict of East versus West, Rush's Hemispheres is worth revisiting:

The Universe divided
As the heart and mind collided
With the people left unguided
For so many troubled years
In a cloud of doubts and fears
Their world was torn asunder into hollow hemispheres