Sunday, January 11, 2009

Apple, The Beatles and Our Beloved Honey Pie

We own a few Apple computers, an iPod Shuffle and a bunch of their software. iTunes, for those on the back end of the technology adoption curve, is the software they developed for organizing and playing digital music. It’s the piece of Apple software that both Kristin and I use the most.

iTunes has a function called sharing. If you’re on a computer network with other iTunes users, you can play their music if they give you access. As you might expect, I love the music that I have in my iTunes library. But, from time to time, I get sick of my music, and I’m ready to browse through someone else’s.

Most of the shared music I listen to comes from my friend Jon Hancuff’s library. And, most of the time I spend listening to his music is spent listening to one of his Beatles albums…Meet the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Help, Magical Mystery Tour or The Beatles (A.K.A., The White Album).

Between John’s albums and my albums (Abbey Road, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Beatles 1, John Lennon’s Imagine, The Best of George Harrison and The Concert for George), I’ve listened to a lot of Beatles music of late. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time reading about them and watching a few different documentaries. I’m sure some of what I’ve learned will surface in later posts.

Kristin picked up on my growing interest. So, when Grandaddy asked what I wanted for Christmas, she knew just the right gift…The White Album – a double album filled with a legendarily eclectic mix of songs from arguably the greatest songwriting team of our time.

I opened what amounts to a near perfect gift for me on Christmas morning, and I streamed it from Kristin’s computer to our wireless speakers in the kitchen so we could listen to the album as we opened presents and, later, ate a breakfast fit for a king. I might add that it was a nice break from the Christmas music we had been listening to for the entire month of December.

It’s at this point that our youngest daughter, Ava, enters the picture. Ava is quintessentially two in almost every way. She’s a handful pretty much every minute she’s awake. That’s why a line from a song on the album called “Honey Pie” (not to be confused with “Wild Honey Pie,” which is also on the album) hit close to home: “Honey Pie … you are making me crazy.” We laughed for a minute and decided that Honey Pie would become the next in a long line of expressive nicknames we have for our wee little Ava.

By the way, I think the song is really about a young man who longs for his love to come back home. If you know Ava, though, and want the full effect of this blog entry, watch this video and think of our Honey Pie as Paul McCartney sings the line above. If you’re interested, here’s some more info on the song, too.

Brian Signature copy

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