Lucentlarks

You found me https://www.instagram.com/lucent.larks

[lucentlarks]

Hey gays-I mean guys.

For those few that manage to find their way to this blog, perhaps by way of accident, curiosity, or a temporary lapse in better judgment, welcome.

I’m gonna post whatever random shit I feel like posting. Maybe you’ll like my brain, or maybe you won’t. Stay if you so choose…. We have a pool table.

[lucentlarks]

Get ready for poems out the ass going foward

[lucentlarks]

WATER

I went back for water and got fired instead.

That is the shape of the day. You can decorate it if you want. You can add the woman I love telling me she thinks we should keep our distance for a while. You can add the fact that I had already been grieving her for days, that my body knew before I did. You can add the panic in the restaurant, the crying while I worked, the bathroom, the manager, the message, the reply, the love still there, the ending still there. You can add the part where I went outside because there was nowhere else for the grief to go.

I found a place with dirt.

I screamed into it until my voice gave out. Then I kept screaming. My mouth opened, my face did the work, my body knew what was happening, but the sound was gone. I fell to the ground. Dirt got in my mouth. Splinters got into my hands. Nothing in the world paused to mark the event. No bird stopped singing out of respect. No tree bent down to say, Yes, this is in fact the worst day of your life. The birds kept their little voices. The people kept theirs. Somewhere, families kept eating lunch.

Eventually I stood up because I was thirsty.

Not spiritually. Not metaphorically. My throat hurt. My mouth was full of dirt. I needed water, which is one of the most humiliating things about having a body. No matter how apocalyptic the day becomes, the body still says yes, but first, water.

So I went back inside for water and got fired instead.

That was genuinely funny for a second. Not good. Not meaningful. Just funny in the way a second piano falling from the sky is funny after the first one has already killed you. It was too perfectly timed. It had the mechanical elegance of cruelty that has stopped improvising and started showing off.

I had been making good money there. I was going to use it for driving lessons. I had attached a future to that money. Roads, a license, some movement, some independence. Maybe this is what all loss is in the end: not only losing the thing itself, but losing the small future that had gathered around it. I did not only lose a job. I lost the next right turn.

And of course I wanted to tell her. That is another problem. Every event immediately turned toward her, as though she were the witness built into the center of my life. Today was one of the biggest events of my life and I could not tell her, not really, because she had just become the event.

I have had worse feelings than words and better words than facts, but today the facts are enough. I got broken up with. I screamed myself hoarse in the dirt. I went back for water. I got fired instead.

There is no lesson in this.

I do not become wiser just because the day was efficiently cruel. The world does not become mine because I suffered honestly in it. The birds continued. The people continued. A couple stood somewhere near me and I hated them for the ancient reason that they were still two people and I had suddenly become one.

Still, I was there.

That may be the only thing that can be said without lying. I was there. The world may not be mine, but I get to live in it. I get to hear the birds continuing their stupid little arguments in the trees. I get to hear strangers talk in the middle of the worst day of my life. I get to tell this story later and see whether anybody laughs when I reach the part about the water.

Maybe I will laugh too.

Not because it was small.

Because it happened.

[lucentlarks]

The spare room still gets the nicest light.

[lucentlarks]

Good self, bad self

The bad self grows first, because hunger is fast

and green, and knows how to climb whatever lets it live.

It finds the wall in me before I know there is a wall,

finds the soft brick, the wet seam, the smallest place to enter.

Nothing happens, really.

A door remains closed, a name does not appear,

some warmth I had imagined goes on without me somewhere else,

and already the bad self is flowering in the dark,

already beautiful in a way I do not trust.

Bad self, vine self, bright-mouthed thing

with its little bells hidden under leaves,

you are not evil.

No, not evil.

Worse: Persuasive.

You are only alive in the old way,

the reaching way, the make-a-god-of-the-window way,

the way a starving plant turns even toward false light

and calls it morning because it has to.

The bad self says, let me grow toward them.

The bad self says, I can become tender enough to be chosen,

patient enough to be used, funny enough not to be pitied.

The bad self says, look, I can wrap myself around absence

until absence has a shape, until the shape has a face,

until the face forgives me for needing it.

And because the bad self is part of me,

because I have worn its leaves on my tongue,

I almost believe it.

I almost let it cover the windows again.

The good self does not arrive like judgment.

The good self is not a sword, not a sermon, not clean white light.

The good self is the hand that remembers the shears,

then sets them down for a moment,

because even the thing that chokes the garden

was only trying to live.

Good self, quiet self, dirt-under-the-nails self,

the one who remembers, sometimes, to care,

says, not everything that reaches deserves to be cut,

but not everything that reaches gets the house.

The bad self trembles through every leaf.

It says, if I do not climb, I will be nothing.

It says, if I do not hold, I will be left.

It says, if I do not bloom for someone, what was the point of all this green?

And I have no answer

that does not insult the garden.

Besides,

I kinda like him.

The bad self, I mean.

The vine with its hands in my pockets,

the bright little idiot climbing the wrong wall,

the one who says I am finished

and then blooms directly into traffic.

I like the nerve of it.

How it suffers in public

and calls that honesty.

How it cares

and does not care,

how it keeps a flower behind its ear

for the funeral it is planning

and will almost certainly survive.

The good self knows this.

The good self, calm as a cup of water,

does not ask me to become less alive.

It only says,

not there.

Not around the throat.

Not over the windows.

Not so deep into another person’s weather

that we forget

the garden has weather of its own.

[lucentlarks]

None of this is sacred.

[lucentlarks]

Sun, you bastard.

I step outside

and the whole world starts touching me.

Heat on my face.

Receipt on my shoe.

A grackle losing its mind

on the grocery sign.

The sidewalk throws light back up

like it wants a fight.

Fine.

I am here.

Unfortunately.

The parking lot shines

with oil, gum, glass,

old fries, hot coins,

one dead bug in a kingdom of ants.

A truck backs up.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Yes, yes, yes,

I hear you.

A woman drops her keys

and says fuck

with real belief.

Beautiful.

The world is disgusting

and overconfident.

The world is disappointing.

The world has a sunburnt neck.

The world smells like pennies, trash juice,

gasoline, onion,

warm Coke in a cup holder.

I hate it,

and it’s hilarious.

A pigeon walks under a car

with the calm of an heir.

A man spits near the curb

and misses the curb.

A plastic bag lifts,

gets dramatic,

then gives up.

Same.

No room.

No little room.

No fan.

No dark.

Just noon

with its hand in my hair.

Just the crosswalk counting down

like it knows something.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

I am alive

in public.

Horrible.

The sky has no subtlety.

Blue everywhere.

Hard white light.

A cloud shaped like nothing.

Thank God.

I am tired of symbols.

Here is a cup.

Here is a straw.

Here is a boot print.

Here is gum gone black

from being stepped on all summer.

Here is my body

sweating through a shirt

I chose badly.

Here are my hands,

empty again,

doing nothing holy.

A bird screams.

I agree.

Sun, you bastard,

you keep arriving.

On the curb.

On the windshield.

On the crushed can.

On the gold tooth

of the man laughing outside the laundromat.

On my face too, fine.

Fine.

I will not be private today.

I will not be deep in the useful way.

I will stand here

in the rude light

with sweat in my collar

and the whole loud world

chewing with its mouth open.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

The truck finally moves.

The heat stays.

The grackle screams again

from the sign.

I look up.

Little black king

of the terrible afternoon,

screaming like you know.

Just tell me already.

[lucentlarks]

Nuance doesn’t hold me.

It stands there

with its wet hands

explaining why everyone left.

Fine.

I know.

They were scared.

They were tired.

They meant well.

They had reasons.

They had lives.

They had someone else

who got there first

and did worse

and still got kept.

Beautiful.

After all the nuance,

my body is still alone.

Still sweating.

Still blinking.

Still visible

in the wrong room

with feelings too alive

for the walls.

Do not give me a trick.

Do not tell me to breathe.

Do not hand me

another little bridge

over the same pit.

I have spent my life

becoming acceptable

before becoming visible,

and now the world

has the nerve

to say lower your voice.

No.

I want to be loved

when I am not useful.

I want to be held

before I turn this

into something wise.

I want to bleed

without making it

a lesson for the room.

The world says

be fair.

The world screams

when I don’t do it

their way.

The sun keeps coming up

like nothing happened.

Bastard.

[lucentlarks]

I think there is a version of grief that wants to be seen in its ugliest form,

wants the skin split open badly enough for everyone in the room to lose their appetite,

wants the bright slick of it on the floor, the tendon-flash, the raw little animal underneath

dragged out from behind the teeth and laid trembling in the light.

Not because suffering is beautiful.

It stinks.

It clots in the hair and under the nails.

It dries black at the edge and pulls the skin tight.

It leaves a smear on the tile, a dark thumbprint on the doorknob.

It makes a person look less tragic than inconvenient.

I keep thinking if I ruined myself thoroughly enough in public

there would be no room left for doubt,

only the open fact of me,

the torn place, the leaking place,

the body giving up its dignity and telling the truth.

And then what?

Who would flinch but stay?

Who would kneel in it, shoes soaking through,

and put both hands over the wound as if they had touched worse things and remained gentle?

Who would let my blood stripe their palms and wrists

without making a face like they had been tricked?

Who would lean close enough to smell the iron and salt of me

and not decide I was too much creature and not enough person?

Because that is part of it, isn’t it?

The shame of still wanting anyone to come nearer at all,

of still hoping the opened body might argue on my behalf,

might make the hurt undeniable,

might make me worth holding.

And afterward the shame will come crawling back clean-dressed and articulate,

telling me I have made too much of myself again,

left too much evidence,

shown the underside like anyone asked to see it.

By tomorrow these lines will look swollen and pathetic to me,

all that need dragged into language, all that blood given syntax.

I will want to disown every word

except I know I wrote them because they were true,

and truth does not get less embarrassing for having been said well.

I imagine walking afterward, one hand pressed to myself, one shoe filling slowly,

my blood making a patient trail behind me through the bright indifferent hallway,

and I wonder who would follow it past the point of spectacle,

past the point where concern curdles into inconvenience,

who would come after me while I was still ugly,

still wet with it,

my face wrecked and stupid with need.

Maybe that is all I want to know:

whether love survives contact with the mess,

whether anyone can feel the hot slick pulse against their fingers

and answer it with something other than fear.

[lucentlarks]

Speaking Candidly

(Pt. 1?)

Welcome to my new blog, Speaking Candidly.

Yes, that title is trademarked. No, you may not verify that.

This is the blog where I speak candidly about things, which I know probably could have been inferred, but I believe in making a strong first impression through redundancy.

Anyway.

What are we speaking candidly about today?

Fear.

More specifically, the fear of stopping for even one second. The fear of sitting still long enough for your own brain to pull up a chair and start talking.

And already, I don’t like this format. It feels too organized. Too intentional. It feels like I’ve somehow already betrayed the spirit of Speaking Candidly by trying to structure it at all. Maybe it should actually be called Speaking Fucking Candidly, just so I don’t forget.

Because really, why not just talk?

Why not just keep talking and talking and talking

andnotevenworryaboutsyntax?

That felt better.

Anyway, yes, I am afraid. I am afraid of many things, and a lot of that fear comes from me.

My fear of abandonment comes from me.

My fear of failure comes from me.

My fear of intoxicated drivers is, I would argue, a community minded concern.

And the annoying thing is that knowing this does not free me from it. I can identify the pattern, trace it back, name it, analyze it, rotate it under fluorescent lighting like a dead bug, and still feel it exactly the same.

I am still afraid.

I am, if I’m being honest, a little sad all the time.

For example: as I write this, I am bracing myself for her to cancel our date tomorrow. Not because she has. Not because I know something. Just because I have learned, very thoroughly, how to anticipate loss before it arrives.

That fear is real because I am really feeling it. It shows up in my body. It shows up in my thoughts. That does not automatically mean the fear is telling the truth. It just means I am having the experience of it, in full.

Which is, frankly, rude.

And then, because I apparently cannot just suffer like a normal person, I start intellectualizing. I explain the fear to myself so I don’t have to fully feel it. Then I notice I’m doing that, and I call myself out for being too meta. Then I become self-conscious about the self-consciousness.

Spooky.

So no, I do not end this writing with a lesson. I have not conquered anything. I have not emerged glowing and wiser and ready to tell you that fear is a gift.

At this moment, it mostly feels like a very committed nuisance.

I end this feeling no better than when I started, and I hope that in some small way, that is comforting.

[lucentlarks]

I’m bored, and what is there to do when bored?

I could go skating, but I did that earlier… maybe something more novel!

…

…..

……….

I could text her,

But I’m trying to practice actual connection, rather than dependency… what would we even talk about? The weather?

Okay, then maybe I can play my piano.

Yes, I could write a simple song about any number of things really.

Love.

Greed.

Existential despair.

Existential… repair..

That happens when you rediscover Camus.

But no… I tend to get sidetracked with my noodling.

Okay..

I guess I could go skating.

I’ll make sure to wave at the Mormons when I pass that church.

[lucentlarks]

Fuck performance.

I am tired of making things beautiful.

Of caring to make it beautiful.

Fuck.

Sometimes it feels right to say fuck.

I tear up,

That’s what I get.

I want to fucking scream

But I can’t.

I’m sad,

confused,

overwhelmed,

scared,

I’m not angry,

I’m definitely not happy.

I wish I wasn’t like this.

I wish sometimes I could just say:

“I fucking hate myself.”

Why can’t I say I hate myself?

I say “it’s not good.”

But how is suppressing that feeling better?

I wish I didn’t attach to people.

I feel like a mangy mutt you keep finding at the door.

I hate myself for loving how I do.

It’s not love.

It’s need.

I do not want to be alone anymore,

I’m tired of it.

I want

to

love

And I want

to be

alone,

Take that contradiction

and shove it down your throat.

[lucentlarks]

Regarding the Act of Looking

You do not lose it.

You lose only the habit of looking.

The hand still closes around the glass

with the same old obedience,

fingers finding curve and weight

as if the body has signed

a quiet agreement with gravity.

Meanwhile the fact remains:

that there is a hand,

that it is yours,

that “yours” can mean anything,

that cold arrives as cold,

that light falls across the counter

and does not merely strike the eye

but appears.

Most days this is translated

before it can become astonishment.

The world is rendered into errands,

into the next small task,

into keys, replies, appointments,

the soft bureaucracy of being alive.

You move through it

the way a sentence moves toward its period,

not asking at each word

how sound became meaning.

It is not that the strangeness went anywhere.

Nothing was lost in the furniture of habit.

Habit was only busy elsewhere,

keeping the animal competent,

letting the foot trust the stair,

letting the mouth answer

when spoken to.

Underneath this fluent performance

the old impossible thing continues:

noise becoming music or warning,

memory brushing the present

and changing its temperature,

the whole interior weather

of being someone

moving invisibly through the day.

You notice, perhaps while rinsing a plate,

or waiting at a red light,

or hearing a dog bark once

in the blue distance of evening,

that all of this has been occurring

without your permission

and somehow as you.

Not in theory.

Not as a concept held at arm’s length

like a specimen in a tray.

But here,

in the warm apparatus of a self,

in the chamber where sensation

cannot help becoming experience.

And nothing is resolved by this.

The dishes still need doing.

The message still goes unanswered.

The hour still passes.

The world does not pause

out of respect for its own impossibility.

It simply continues,

calm as ever,

while the floor remains unfathomable

beneath the feet,

while the most familiar things

go on being unspeakably strange

and ask for nothing

but to be noticed

for half a second

before habit, kind and efficient,

leads you gently on.

[lucentlarks]

Some Truths Don’t Scale

An essay on belief, meaning, silence, and yes, bread.

I understand why astrology, religion, and other symbolic systems persist. They arise from the same cognitive machinery that produces myth, moral law, and narrative identity: pattern-seeking minds embedded in uncertainty, trying to compress reality into something livable. I am not exempt from the limits of that machinery. I can be triggered, emotionally dysregulated, reactive before reflective. But I refuse to misattribute those reactions to metaphysical causes.

When someone reacts before thinking, that is not a zodiacal inevitability. It is a describable interaction among limbic activation, learned threat models, attentional bias, and insufficient prefrontal inhibition. In other words, a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do under stress. Naming it accurately preserves agency. Renaming it cosmically dissolves responsibility.

Astrology and religion function most coherently as symbolic grammars. Like Jungian archetypes or mythic structures analyzed by comparative anthropology, they encode recurring human concerns, power, loss, desire, guilt, into narrative form. Treated as metaphor, they are psychologically legible and culturally powerful. Treated as literal explanations, they commit a categorical error. They confuse narrative coherence with empirical adequacy. Reading scripture as cosmology, or astrology as behavioral science, is like using a novel to calculate orbital mechanics. The problem is not that these systems lack meaning. It is that they are being asked to perform a task they were never designed to do.

Science is not a rival mythology. It is a method for adjudicating claims about the world. It does not traffic in certainty, only in models with predictive power. Its epistemic backbone is falsifiability, replication, and convergence under constraint. A scientific theory survives not because it feels true, but because it continues to generate accurate predictions under hostile testing. Newtonian mechanics gave way to relativity not because Newton was simply wrong, but because a broader model subsumed the old one under new conditions. This is the defining virtue of science: it improves by admitting failure. Trust in science is not faith in conclusions. It is confidence in a process explicitly engineered to detect and correct its own errors.

I am especially skeptical of belief systems that must delegitimize others in order to remain coherent. That impulse rarely reflects malice. More often, it reflects structural fragility. When a worldview depends on exclusivity, when it must be the only true account in order to function, alternative frameworks become existential threats rather than competing hypotheses. This is why religious traditions so often polemicize one another. Not because the others are demonstrably false, but because pluralism destabilizes total meaning. Science does not engage in this kind of rivalry. It does not need to debunk religion rhetorically. It simply proceeds by modeling phenomena, publishing results, and letting predictive success, or failure, do the talking.

I do not reject religion or astrology because I fail to understand their appeal. I reject them as explanatory authorities because they are non-operational. They cannot be tested, cannot be parameterized, and cannot update without undermining their own foundations. They are meaning systems, not knowledge systems. Explanations that invite scrutiny, tolerate uncertainty, and remain perpetually revisable will always be more compelling to me than those that demand certainty in exchange for obedience.

And yet.

I am aware that even articulating this position in such a calibrated, reference-heavy way risks reinforcing the very impression it pretends to critique: someone who has read too much, noticed too many structural failures, and now struggles to sound neutral about them. This self-awareness does not absolve the arrogance. It merely makes it deliberate. Still, there is a difference between smugness born of insecurity and smugness born of having actually followed the arguments to their logical conclusions and finding them inconveniently one-sided.

Yes, the tone is sharpened. Yes, there is a faint whiff of superiority. But that superiority is not rooted in moral virtue or personal enlightenment. It is rooted in epistemic hygiene. It is the quiet impatience of someone watching category errors be defended with passion, as though intensity could substitute for rigor. If that impatience leaks into the prose, it is because pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

In one sense, this is not really an argument meant to persuade. It is a boundary. It clarifies the kinds of explanations I am willing to entertain seriously, and which I am content to leave in the realm of poetry, ritual, and personal meaning. Some truths are allowed to be small, local, and unjustifiable. Not every conviction needs to scale. Not every preference needs to be universalized.

One of mine is bread.

There is a seasonal loaf made by a man who is, for lack of a better term, my plug, in a village in Italy so small it barely survives abstraction. It is not famous. It does not ship. It exists briefly, stubbornly, and only when the air is cold enough that the dough behaves the way he insists it should. He makes it once a year, and I am convinced, without peer review, without blind testing, without even the courtesy of skepticism, that it is the best bread I will ever eat.

I could gesture at reasons: the fermentation time, the mineral content of the water, the way the crust fractures instead of shatters. But none of this would survive serious scrutiny. My confidence here is not epistemic. It is devotional. This bread tastes like winter handled correctly. Like restraint. Like someone choosing not to optimize something into oblivion. I trust it not because it has earned my trust in any rigorous sense, but because I want the world to contain things that are this specific and unnecessary.

This is probably the point where someone would accuse me of overthinking, which is always an interesting charge. No one accuses a bridge engineer of overthinking load-bearing limits. We reserve that accusation almost exclusively for people who insist that beliefs should survive contact with reality. If that insistence feels annoying, it is because it introduces friction where we have grown used to gliding.

I hold opinions that range from aggressively evidence-based to unapologetically indefensible, and I am self-aware enough to know exactly which category each one occupies. I trust randomized controlled trials more than vibes, except when it comes to coffee, bread, or the correct hour to listen to certain albums, where my standards collapse into something closer to ritual. I believe emotional regulation is a skill that can be trained, not a personality trait bestowed by the month of one’s birth, and yet I will still judge a person quietly for clapping on the wrong beats.

I think most intellectual disputes are really about status, not truth, which is why they are so loud and so unproductive. I maintain that science is the least arrogant system we have ever built because it is the only one willing to admit it might be wrong, and I say this with full awareness of how insufferable I sound while saying it. I distrust grand narratives, romanticize small ones, and reserve my fiercest convictions for things that cannot be proven and do not need to be: the superiority of certain seasonal foods, the moral necessity of good silence, the fact that some people confuse sincerity with insight.

This probably makes me difficult. It also, irritatingly, makes me right often enough to be dangerous.

[lucentlarks]

Why the Beatles Are Underrated

An essay on technical mastery, the tyranny of contrarianism, and why “Here Comes the Sun” still doesn’t get the respect it deserves

The Beatles are not overrated. This should not be a controversial claim, but in certain rooms saying it aloud will get you marked as someone with unexamined taste, a nostalgia problem, or an inability to distinguish canonical weight from actual merit. The contrarian position, that the Beatles are fine but inflated by boomer mythology, has become so widespread that it now functions as the default pose of anyone trying to signal discernment. This is lazy. Worse, it is wrong.

The Beatles are underrated precisely because most people who praise them cannot articulate why they are good. They defer to sales figures, cultural impact, or the vague assertion that they “changed everything,” none of which are musical arguments. Meanwhile, the people who dismiss them do so on equally thin grounds: they sound dated, they are too pop, everyone likes them, so they must be overrated. Both positions are analytically empty. The actual case for the Beatles requires listening like a musician, not a fan.

I am not interested in their cultural footprint. I do not care that they were on Ed Sullivan or that boomers cried at Shea Stadium. I care about what happens in the music itself, the choices that separate competent songwriting from something much harder to replicate.

Start with McCartney’s bass lines. They are not just rhythmic support. They are independent melodies running underneath the song. Listen to “Come Together”: the bass is doing as much work as the vocal, moving in its own direction while still supporting the structure as a whole. Or take “Something,” where the bass moves against the vocal melody in the verse, creating space without stepping on anything. Most bassists play roots and fifths and call it done. McCartney was writing counterpoint.

The vocal arrangements are even more precise. The “ah” vocals in “Because” are stacked in three-part harmony, each line recorded three times, creating a nine-voice texture that sounds like a choir but moves with the tightness of a string section. The opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” is voiced in a way that seems to require either two guitars at once or some non-standard tuning. Either way, it is not something you stumble into. It is architected.

Then there is the studio work, which gets credited to George Martin but was genuinely collaborative. “Tomorrow Never Knows” runs a backward sitar loop layered with seagull sounds, actually McCartney’s laughter sped up, while Ringo plays a pattern derived from North Indian tabla. Lennon’s vocal is run through a Leslie speaker, creating that disorienting, detached quality. This was 1966. They were inventing techniques in real time.

Most people who dismiss the Beatles point to their early work, “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” as evidence of simplicity. But simplicity is not the same as ease. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” shifts between keys in the space of eight bars without ever feeling jarring. The bridge moves into a minor key in a way that should feel awkward in a pop song, yet does not, because the melody anticipates the change. The rhythm is syncopated just enough to feel urgent rather than predictable. None of this is accidental.

“Here Comes the Sun” is the example everyone knows but almost no one hears structurally. The verse delays tonal certainty just enough that the pre-chorus feels like clarification rather than mere repetition. Then the bridge shifts time signatures, 11/8 into 4/4, in a way that feels completely natural because the melody is doing the counting for you. Most listeners do not consciously register this. They just feel the song breathe.

This is the kind of craft that hides its own difficulty. Rhythm, melody, and harmonic tension are folded so seamlessly together that the song sounds easier than it is. You do not really notice this until you try to play it yourself. Then the “simple” song reveals itself as a small architectural feat.

I understand the resistance to calling the Beatles “the best.” Superlatives flatten conversation into ranking games. But the resistance has overcorrected into a reflexive dismissal that does not engage with the actual music. The claim is not that the Beatles are the best because they sold the most records or were culturally significant. The claim is that they solved musical problems with a level of economy, sophistication, and taste that almost no one else matched.

You can prefer other bands. You can find their catalog uneven, it is. You can think Lennon’s voice is grating or McCartney’s sentimentality cloying. None of that changes the fact that the structural sophistication of their best work operates at a level most musicians spend entire careers trying to reach.

The people who say “the Beatles are overrated” rarely mean, “I have analyzed their songwriting and found it wanting.” They mean, “I am tired of hearing about them,” or “I do not like their cultural dominance,” or “I want to like something less obvious.” Those are aesthetic preferences, not musical critiques. The actual music, when you sit down with it, when you learn to play it, when you try to reverse-engineer what is happening, reveals craft that holds up under scrutiny.

And yet.

There is a recording of “Blackbird” that I listened to on repeat for six months when I was sixteen, and I am convinced, without analysis, without justification, without even the pretense of objectivity, that it is one of the most perfect pieces of music ever written. Not because of the fingerpicking pattern, though it is deceptively difficult. Not because of the harmonic movement, though it is elegant. Because it sounds like hope without sentimentality, like fragility without weakness, like something small holding itself together against enormous pressure.

I can tell you that the bird sounds in the background are actual field recordings, that the vocal phrasing leans slightly behind the beat in a way that creates space, that the song is structured around a rising melodic line that mirrors the lyrical content. I can break it down. But the truth is that I love this song for reasons that have nothing to do with structure and everything to do with the fact that it was playing the first time I realized I could survive the thing I thought would kill me.

This belief would not survive objective testing. There are other versions, other performances, other fingerpickers who have done technically more impressive things. My certainty here is not epistemic. It is devotional. I want the world to contain a song this small and this necessary. I want McCartney to have written it in a hotel room in India in 1968 while the rest of the band were meditating, tripping, or arguing. I want the simplicity to be intentional, not a limitation.

This is where someone will accuse me of exactly the nostalgia I just spent paragraphs dismissing. Fair enough. But there is a difference between defending the Beatles because they were formative and defending them because the music holds up under scrutiny. I can do both. I can separate “this songwriting is demonstrably sophisticated” from “this song saved my life when I was sixteen.” The first is an argument. The second is a fact about my interior landscape and does not need to be universalized.

The backlash against the Beatles is less about the music than about the baggage: the boomer mythology, the Imagine hagiography, the endless nostalgia industry. I get it. But conflating cultural oversaturation with musical mediocrity is a category error. The fact that something has been co-opted or overexposed does not retroactively make it bad. It only makes it exhausting to defend.

Most people who claim the Beatles are overrated have never tried to play their songs. This matters. Listening is one kind of knowing; playing is another. The difficulty does not announce itself. The songs sound effortless, which is the highest compliment you can pay to craft. But effortlessness is expensive. It costs hours of revision, structural decision-making, and the kind of taste that knows when to stop adding.

If that sounds arrogant, it is because precision often does. I am not claiming moral authority or superior taste. I am claiming that, when you analyze what is actually happening in the music, the technical superiority becomes undeniable. You can prefer other things. You cannot pretend the craft is not there.

I do not need everyone to agree. I just need people to stop mistaking dismissal for discernment. The Beatles are not above criticism. Their catalog is uneven. Their cultural afterlife is exhausting. None of that changes what is in the songs.

And sometimes, late at night, when the algorithm serves up “Here Comes the Sun” and I have not heard it in months, I still catch some detail I missed, a harmonic turn, a rhythmic decision, a reason the song has survived decades of overplay and still feels fresh.

That is not nostalgia. It is craft.