Boston Book Festival 2017

As the music world fragments into ever-narrower niches, by some miracle The Beatles are still finding new listeners every day who go on to soundtrack their entire lives to the Fab Four’s small clutch of timeless albums (and some of the solo work, too­—maybe). In Dreaming the Beatles, Rob Sheffield explores why, out of all the sights and sounds that emerged from the wild ferment of the ’60s, it’s these four mop-topped Liverpudlians who continue to hold us rapt. But even if love for The Beatles is nigh universal, everyone has their own history with the music, and in the new anthology In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs, nearly thirty writers explain which tracks have resonated with them through the years. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik argues for the richness of the thematic interplay between the two songs on the landmark “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields” single; longtime music journalist and biographer Alan Light sees deep currents within early hit “I Saw Her Standing There”; and Touré, author most recently of I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon, tackles the other end of The Beatles’ short, magnificent time together by looking at the globe-trotting “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” the band’s final song to reach number one in the UK. The moderator and Fifth Beatle (Fan) for this discussion is WBUR’s Shira Springer.