They ALL Came in Through the Bathroom Window
October 23, 2018·5 comments·In Brief
A song's origin story has four different tellings. Each sounds plausible. Each includes specific, verifiable details that seem to confirm it. Yet they can't all be true in the same way, and we have no reliable mechanism to determine which one is. This reveals something unsettling about how we accept narratives as facts.
- Four different people claim to be the inspiration, and each story fits the lyrics perfectly. A fan named Diane Ashley, a Moody Blues bandmate, a dancer-turned-thief named Susie Landis, and Paul's own wife Linda all have narratives that connect to specific lyrical details. The more suspicious the source, the more precisely her story maps to the song.
- The most elaborate version includes details so on-the-nose they should disqualify it as true. A dancer references the lyric "she said she'd always been a dancer." A father with blackmail material explains "protected by her silver spoon." A chain of phone calls from Sunday to Monday to Tuesday to producers named Monday and contacts named Tuesday Weld explains the entire line. It reads like someone reverse-engineered the lyrics into a biography.
- Yet that same story may still be partially true. Something happened that involved a bathroom window and a stolen recording. Someone was involved. The real events got wrapped in narrative afterward, fitted to the song like a puzzle piece rather than discovered within it.
- The problem isn't that we're being lied to. The problem is that reality is overdetermined. Most significant events have so many causes, contributors, and influences that you can construct multiple explanations using the same facts. If you're not careful, confident attribution of causality becomes its own form of fiction.
- We do this constantly in financial news and market analysis. We read why stocks moved today, why markets are behaving this way, why this policy will cause that outcome. We look for the "but, because, therefore" chain that makes it all sensible. But what if multiple contradictory explanations are all partially right, and picking one makes you blind to the others?
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Comments
Cathy’s Clown, Catch the Wind, God Only Knows, I’ll Be Back Again, Something. I just paid $200 so I could post that! Cheers
(Babe, I’m gonna leave you; Witchy Woman; Crazy; You’re So Vain)
Hah - so worth it!
I hadn’t really thought of ‘Babe, I’m gonna leave you’ as a love song, but if we’re calling it that, it would make the cut. You could go ‘Thank you’ to keep Zeppelin in the mix, too. Borderline love songs for me would have to include George Jones’s ‘He stopped loving her today.’
But here’s my Top 10:
1.) God Only Knows - Beach Boys
2.) Something - Beatles
3.) Lover, You Should Have Come Over - Jeff Buckley
4.) Sweet Thing - Van Morrison
5.) You Were Always on My Mind - Willie Nelson (I don’t want to hear it, BJ Thomas / Elvis truthers. It’s Willie’s song now.)
6.) Lay Lady Lay - Dylan
7.) I Can’t Stop Loving You - Ray Charles
8.) Maybe I’m Amazed - McCartney / Wings
9.) Tired of Being Alone - Al Green
10.) Can’t Help Falling in Love - Elvis
Realizing now I’ve left out Layla and One, but there’s JUST NO ROOM, y’all.
You’re Tangled Up in Blue ;()
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