30 Day Song Challenge: Day 4 (A Song That Makes You Sad)

The fourth day caused me a lot of trouble, more than the previous days, but I think in the end my choice of a song that makes me sad complements yesterday’s choice almost perfectly. It’s a song I haven’t listened to in a few years, and hearing it again brought back a rush of memories and feelings associated with it, and it suddenly seems even more relevant to me now, all these years later.

In My Life is the other side of the coin to Thunder Road. It’s an elegy to everything you leave behind in your life, a nostalgic reflection on places and people of the past, of shared time and wasted time and all the wonderful things that go with youth.

This is a song about growing up, which is something I’ve recently ventured into. Having spent almost 5 years on the other side of the country, I often reflect on my hometown, and the years I spent there. Simpler times, and maybe happier. This song reminds me of my teenagehood at home for two reasons: first, I listened to it a lot back then just because I thought it was a nice song, and second because listening to it now I realise what The Beatles are really saying in it: time goes by and all you’re left with are memories.

But the real reason this song makes me sad is that simple and inescapable fact that things change. I can never get back that time in my life, never relive those memories. A melancholic sense of nostalgia pervades this song, a nostalgia for things that no longer remain. “Some have changed: some forever, not for better,” they sing, and they’re right. On returning home, every time I notice something has changed, something has gone, something that became a cherished memory for me now exists only as that. A favourite bar, a pizzeria, even the people have changed.

There is a great sorrow in leaving things behind. Sometimes all you want is to get out and explore, but you never really realise how much you take the present for granted. We all plan for the future, we all have hopes and dreams, and we sometimes forget to stop and look around and savour what we have right now, because we don’t think that someday in the bright and shining future we’ve got laid out for ourselves, what is now the present will invariably become the past, and will end up as nothing more than images and songs and snatches of emotion.

There are things that are beyond all our control, and the one that’s always on the front of people’s minds is getting older and saying goodbye. In My Life is---beyond all other things---a farewell to the past, to youth and to all those places and people we’ll never get back. But it’s not all bad in the end, really, because no matter how much things change, they’ll always remain in my memories, and in my life I’ve loved them all.