Good morning.
I hope you had a good Thanksgiving and are enjoying the long holiday weekend.
It’s been a few weeks since I last posted anything and you’ll have to excuse me, because I’m going to write about The Beatles again.
As you may have heard, earlier this month “The Beatles” released a “new” song called “Now and Then.” You can read all about the song’s provenance in lots of other places.
If you don’t know but want the shorthand, the deal is this: John recorded a demo of the song in 1977 but it was never released; the Threetles (George, Paul, and Ringo) tried their hand at releasing it along with “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” during the Beatles Anthology sessions in the 1990s but never saw it through; now using AI and other advanced technology they were able to improve John’s vocal recording and produce the track.
“Now and Then” is fine. It’s not the best of the batch of songs released after John’s death. (That would be “Real Love.”) The song is a neat little production (notice the use of background harmonies from “Because” from Abbey Road to fill out the sound at one point and some nice Paul guitar licks that sound very much like George in 1968-1969) that actually grows on you over time. It’s more Beatles product to sell and there are plenty of worse products to sell. Who knows what John Lennon even thought of this song.
But I’ve heard this Beatles song on the radio this entire month. I find that fact kind of surreal and fascinating. I just can’t believe that in the year 2023, sixty years after they broke through, The Beatles still manage to be actively present in whatever remains of pop culture. I don’t even really like “Now and Then” that much and yet it's been in my life every day. I find myself humming it while cooking or doing the dishes.
And I don’t think it’s only because I have an unhealthy obsession with The Beatles. Maybe it is, but I don’t think so. It might be though, because I was already thinking about the many strange layers of the relationship I have with The Beatles before “Now and Then” became a part of the conversation.
We all have parasocial relationships these days right? I listen to a ton of podcasts, so I certainly do. Probably not in a healthy way, but I suppose I’ll sort that out at some point.
I listen to several Beatles podcasts. There’s plenty of good ones out there. The first one I started listening to was Something About The Beatles. That one was for real Beatles nerds. Then I started exploring Spotify for more Beatles podcasts and found One Sweet Dream, which was a very academic Beatles podcast. I also listened to Another Kind of Mind, which didn’t stick but was also good.
At the beginning of this year, I found a podcast called Take It Away, which was focused entirely on the solo career of Paul McCartney. Being the lunatic that I am, I plowed through this podcast after reading a 700 page book covering Paul McCartney’s life in the years 1969-1973. I listened to this podcast at the gym, while cooking, while packing up my Brooklyn apartment. I fell in love with this podcast.
Take It Away was created by Ryan Brady and Chris Mercer. Brady was a student of Mercer’s at Northwestern University and they bonded after Brady included part of an unreleased McCartney song called “Cage” (which is absolutely dope, by the way) in a sound collage project. They remained in touch as Brady went on to have a career in marketing in the music industry and, in 2016, the two started their podcast together.
I love listening to these guys talk about Paul McCartney albums and songs. They love Paul McCartney and his music but aren’t afraid to be objective and are very quick to point out when Paul is half-assing a song, when his lyrics make absolutely no sense (see their discussion of the lyric “when your love is unkind as a penny” from the song “Get On The Right Thing” from the Red Rose Speedway Episode), and when he says something absurd to the press or does something ridiculous in his personal life (see the background to the recording of London Town and Back to the Egg).
They both have very dry senses of humor that remind me of people in my life who have cracked me up over the years. Sometimes I think they are trying to be funny. Other times, I know they are just drily delivering a critique but it still makes me laugh for some reason.
I’ve listened to individual episodes of the show multiple times. That’s my own strange obsessive behavior: I often relisten to podcast episodes for a sense of comfort. But I think that shows you how much I’ve come to love this podcast.
So, then, it came as a bit of shock to me to learn last month that Ryan Brady is dead. And has been for nearly three years.
Ryan Brady died in a car accident in Los Angeles in 2020. Variety wrote an obituary about him.
When I started listening to Take It Away at the beginning of this year, I didn’t really feel the need to do much research on the hosts. I just liked listening to their show: they were warm toward each other, I could tell they knew their stuff, I was learning things from them, and, like I said, they freaking loved Paul McCartney. That’s all I needed.
During my move to Austin, I took a break listening to the show at the Flowers In the Dirt (1989) episode. There was plenty to do and I was busy with lots of other things. Then, in October, my girlfriend and I were house sitting and dog sitting a golden retriever named Barkley. Each morning, I’d wake up to walk Barkley and feed her. I was feeling a little out of sorts and living in the home of someone I barely knew for two weeks, working and drinking the coffee grounds they had on hand. So I turned to Take It Away for comfort.
I started listening to the show from the beginning again because I know the 1970s McCartney albums the best. As I was listening and remembering how much I loved the show. I decided to look up the hosts and that’s when I saw that Ryan Brady had died in a car crash in 2020 at the age of 34.
I read about his career in the music business and his achievements. I read about the work he put into the podcast. I realized he was born one year after me but was already dead. And I felt a great deal of sadness and also some shame that I didn’t know that fact already. I also thought how strange it was that this parasocial relationship I’d just formed was with someone who had passed away three years ago.
Like I said, we all have parasocial relationships. When celebrities or musicians or world figures that we somehow felt close to, but never knew, die we post about it online or text our friends and family about it.
I used to do that too. But somewhere along the way I stopped feeling something when notable figures died. I don’t know why exactly. I think I got used to it the same way I got used to the fact that each year there will continue to be more people younger than me than people older than me.
And I’ve listened to podcasts before where a key part of the show has died. I listened to the Comedy Bang Bang podcast back when Harris Wittels was one of the main recurring guests on the show. In 2015, Harris died of a heroin overdose. After his death, I remember listening to Scott Aukerman, the host of Comedy Bang Bang, do an introduction to an episode of the show paying tribute to Harris.
In a shaky voice, Scott talked about his relationship with Harris, including how he probably wasn’t the best person to eulogize him. I listened to that intro again to write this and it remains one of the more intimate things I might ever experience with a stranger that I will probably never know in any way but who has entertained me for hours of my life—through shitty hours spent at a shitty job, through rides on the LIRR or the subway, and through intermittent afternoon naps in my apartment.
But Harris Wittels was an entertainer. He worked on TV shows and in movies and was a professional comedian. Ryan Brady was a professional in the music industry who had a podcast about a musician he loved. His profile as an adult man in his thirties was a lot closer to mine.
In his tribute to Harris Wittels, Scott Aukerman says a mutual friend of theirs wrote to him to say, “it's nice that we have these recordings that we can listen to when we miss him.” And I’m sure people who knew Ryan Brady feel the same way.
But I didn’t know him at all. I’m simply a guy that loves Paul McCartney who loves listening to his show about Paul McCartney.
Take It Away has continued on without Ryan Brady. After his death, the show took a break. But Chris Mercer has resumed recording with a new co-host named Paul Kaminski. They’ve been releasing episodes since the fall of 2021. The project has expanded beyond Paul McCartney albums. They will now be making their way through the solo records of all the Beatles.
With the release of “Now and Then” this month, they did a special episode analyzing the song. Their reaction to the song was basically the same as mine. And it was nice, if a little bit strange, to listen to people I don’t know talk about a song I don’t really have a strong opinion about released under the name of a band that I love more than anything but that doesn’t really exist anymore because two of their members are dead.
If “Now and Then” is anything, it is a vaguely melancholic song. And that is how this experience has made me feel. It strikes me as a uniquely modern phenomenon: listening to hours of a stranger talk about a band that broke up over 50 years ago, thinking that person is alive and not knowing that they are actually dead, and then feeling a vague sadness about it.
I didn’t know Ryan Brady. Lots of other people did, including the co-host of his podcast, Chris Mercer. I can’t imagine how much they must miss him every day and every week. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be reminded that he’s gone. The only thing that ties us together, I suppose, is the fact that we can listen to those recordings that Ryan brought into the world. They can listen because they miss him. I can listen because I’m another fan of the Beatles and Paul McCartney. I’m another stranger on Spotify.