Spring is here and Leeds play Chelsea tomorrow and Ringo and John
and George and Paul are alive and well and full of hope.
The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you.
When the spinning stops — that'll be the time to worry, not before.
Until then, the Beatles are alive and well and the beat goes on, the beat goes on.
— Final Beatles press release, April 10, 1970

There's a clip in Anthology from a British TV show à la Saturday Night Live, in which the wall of the set blows up and the Beatles come bursting through, all laughing and inexorable with guitars in hand. That's a pretty apt description of how these boys came barging into my life.

In the spring of 2002, I enrolled in the Beatles class at Indiana University. I was not a Beatles fan, but I'd heard great things about the class, I liked "oldies" music, and I thought it'd be a fun way to end my senior year. I had no idea how much my life was about to change.

It happened practically overnight. Suddenly, my old CD collection began gathering dust. My vocabulary sprouted "whilst"s and "anyroad"s. I devoured every Beatle book and video I could get my hands on. And one night, less than three weeks after beginning the course, I suddenly burst into tears while listening to "Julia." I was crying for John, who was killed when I was exactly five months old — an event I never dreamed I would be crying over twenty-one years later. And in that moment, I knew that these four amazing people and their beautiful noise had become part of my life forever.

This page is dedicated with love to John, George, Ringo, and Paul.