I'm Looking Through You

About

The author Tom Hartley.

This site “I’m Looking Through You” is home to my Beatles Song-A-Day blog, which began life in December 2024 as a Bluesky thread.

I retired from my job as an academic scientist (neuroscience and psychology) in October 2024. While I am still interested in science, music is another important enthusiasm for me. I have been a Beatles fan (obsession waxing and waning) for about 45 years.

Peace and Love

We live in interesting times. At the time I started the thread there was a lot of bad news around the world, and it was already clear that much more was on the horizon. I don’t want to crassly avoid all the dark stuff in the world, but I do want to counteract it somehow.

Music can bring people together, it can give people hope, it helps people carry on, so it’s an important aspect of humanity. Thinking and talking about it does no harm at all.

For all their individual flaws, their ups-and-downs and mistakes, I think the Beatles are a force for good in the world.

Thinking about creativity

I think it is interesting to wonder about where creativity comes from. The Beatles were unusual in being a group of four people who were exceptionally creative and culturally influential. How does that happen? Is there a lesson for the rest of us?

Now we see the beginnings of artificial creativity. But can it ever take the place of human creativity? As human creativity begins to be displaced by AI, will it not make what remains even more scarce and valuable? I don’t mean valuable to the corporations and governments we work for, but to actual humans – who very are strange beings. People will cross continents to see a scrap of fabric, a splinter of wood, or a bone because of what it represents. They will pay hundreds of millions of dollars for an original painting even when the image itself is freely available in the public domain.

Thinking about evaluation

It’s a bit meta but as I’ve been writing the early entries in the blog, it has made me think quite a bit about how we evaluate and criticise art. As a scientist I had no training in this (some people do entire degrees and write books), but just like everyone else I have my opinions. But going more systematically through the set of songs has made me think more carefully about whether and how we can compare different pieces. In writing the blog I am gradually forming some ideas about this and I am learning that the mere act of comparison tends to diminish the things that are being compared.

Sources

I generally try to write one article a day, and I sometimes do them quite quickly. I consult a range of sources especially:

  • The Beatles Bible (where possible I include a link in each article)
  • Wikipedia (where possible I include a link in each article)
  • beatles.com
  • The Beatles Anthology, by the Beatles (book)
  • The Beatles – All These Years: Volume One: Tune In, Mark Lewisohn
  • The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road years 1962-1970, Mark Lewisohn
  • The Complete Beatles Scores
  • Get Back, by the Beatles (book)
  • Here There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, Geoff Emerick
  • The Lyrics, Paul McCartney
  • Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
  • Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties, Ian McDonald

I have also read quite a few more books, watched various documentaries and listened to many podcasts which I have absorbed to some extent but I don’t always recall where I got a particular idea, or whether it is original.

  • The Beatles One, Two, Three, Four (book), Craig Brown
  • Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt.Pepper, George Martin
  • Living the Beatles Legend, Kenneth Womack
  • John, Cynthia Lennon
  • Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon, Julia Baird
  • Get Back (the Peter Jackson documentary miniseries)
  • One Sweet Dream podcast
  • History of Rock in 500 Songs podcast
  • They May Be Parted blog