Notes on "Julia"

the best Beatles song, still

—This song provides a helpful suggestion to anyone who is attempting to make music, charm someone, or craft a universe: provide almost complete satisfaction. This is the method of its melody, which is an example of exquisitely torturous restraint. You know, deep in your bones, that John’s voice should reach up and touch C# during the refrain, on the words “song of love.” But he doesn’t, sliding sideways saucer-like, instead, and the droney gesture sounds almost wrong. When the melody finally does reach up towards the promised crest, just before the song’s end, and then once more again, it is like an iridescent inkwell spilled backward onto what has gone before, making the grey opalescent, revealing all the colors that were longed for.

—This forestalling, tantalizing quality mirrors the sensation of wanting someone you can’t have, whether the non-having is the fault of incompatible desire or inconvenient mortality. Ironically, it’s the absence that you crave, ultimately—the image built up by the longing itself, the entity that is built in the constriction of lonely hours. Further delay is the only possible gratification. Like a rainbow approached, getting it would ruin it, but that’s fine, since it’s un-gettable.

—And yet, for all that this song deals in fantasy, distance and delay, it centers around the most elementary, concrete human request: touch me. 

—I’ve never heard a song that sounded both so full of childlike wonder and yet so exhausted. The vocal performance is weirdly muted, resigned, and dutiful. Specifically, the line “her hair of ocean sky is shimmering, glimmering,” is delivered in the somnolent yet dedicated tone that comes out when you’re reading to your lover who is almost asleep, whose sleep you must provide, while you are almost asleep yourself. The last chord sounds like becoming comatose on sand. The wounded inner child and the jaded touring musician are not in conflict; they are simply nested entities in one skin. 

—It’s funny that McCartney is the more consistent songwriter, and the more musically talented, and wrote many more great songs, but that he could never quite touch the quality of Lennon’s four or five best; Yesterday has a salesmanlike sheen and a period cleverness that dates it, and even Blackbird has a little bit of distancing cuteness, but Julia doesn’t have any of that. Perhaps the answer is that McCartney couldn’t be unprofessional. Lennon, at the height of his talents, could stay messy, naive, personal, and childlike. These chords make no sense: they are the product of someone who is willing to put his hands on the guitar inappropriately. Also, you can’t really imagine Paul writing a love song addressed to both his dead mother and living paramour. That would be indecent, and also, bad art, in the way that much truly great art is.

—The imperfect double-tracking of the guitar is probably not intentional. In the studio, Lennon screwed up the first few takes, and briefly considered strumming it, before returning to the fingerpicked style. But the sloppiness, in this case, works: it gives an impressionistic blur to what otherwise might be a monotonous rhythm. The same is true of the ominously dissonant bass notes that add a chewy wobble to the harmonic atmosphere, which are, strictly speaking, musical errors.

—“Seashell eyes, windy smile”—this is the vague fantasy of someone who grew up in a slightly shitty place with not much to look at, whose budding feelings couldn’t be captured by the surrounding landscape of his youth, and instead needed imagistic accompaniment from the wide, rushing wind and water of hypnagogia. At the same time, there is something distinctly English about the chilly paleness of this landscape, the way that the sun sang about doesn’t quite significantly warm.

—Many timeless pop songs are easily covered, and this is one mark of greatness. But this simple song feels nearly impossible to cover. A mite slower, and it drags. A mite faster, and it’s too zingy. Under-sing it more, and it goes from movingly distracted to inert and apathetic. Sing it full-throated, and it becomes too corny. A cleaner, better voice ruins it; you need Lennon’s cigarette-faded reediness. (Imagine Tom Jones singing this, for example.) If the original performance sounds a bit tossed off, try to toss off a better one, and you will see what I mean. Most people miss the point by trying to warm it up, like this. The relentlessly capable Bill Frisell turns it into elevator music. This is the only really enjoyable cover I could find.

—And yet for all of this, Julia is still a modest thing, a small gift. Compare it to a poem of loss from someone like John Berryman, who writes, of himself, upon losing a friend, “he flung to pieces and they hit the floor.” Nobody is coming to pieces here. It’s relatable: we lose things of great importance that we think we cannot be without, but then, improbably, we are fine. We have adult pain: these portable wounds, light enough to be traveled with in all seasons.