In our first kiss
I felt the depth of your soul
I could taste forever
In our last kiss
I felt the depth of your deceit
I could taste her on you
So, I did the A to Z Challenge in April. I chose The Beatles for my theme. Scroll to the bottom of this post for a list of links.
I like the theme that I chose. I know a lot about The Beatles, but I learned a few things along the way too. And every post has a link to a song, so there’s great music all the way through. I’ve done themed posts before {on a different blog} but never one with this many posts. I’m sure I’ll do themed posts again. Will I do the A to Z Challenge again? Probably not.
It took a lot of time. I knew I couldn’t be online every day. Scheduling posts ahead of time let me keep my entries up-to-date, but I was unable to get around to reading posts by other people nearly as much as I had hoped to. I made sure I visited every person that left a comment for me. I am following a few new blogs now, but according to my site stats I didn’t pick up any new followers. {Some might, of course, continue to visit without signing on as a follower. We’ll see.} That’s a little disappointing. On the other hand, music-related posts are usually a fraction of my posts, so the April challenge probably doesn’t adequately represent what new followers may find here in the next few months. And I suspect that will be true of the content of the blogs I have started following — it’s going to be different from April, and I may or may not continue to follow.
I wish that the list of participants included whether the participant was using a theme and what that theme was. I think I might have found more blogs that had content I was interested in. And I wish there were some way to cull people from the list who signed up, but didn’t keep up. Or maybe a way to preview what their most recent post was. By the third week, it seemed like half the links I explored were not up-to-date, and some hadn’t been since the first week.
In all, it was an interesting challenge and I’m glad I tried it. For me this was a successful challenge as a writer because I wrote a post {and stayed on theme} for every one of the 26 days. I may have had unreasonable expectations about the number of new blogs I would find to follow and how many new followers I could pick up though. Maybe it was naive to expect that at all. Maybe I should have looked at it simply as a one-shot deal, but I have zero interest in trying to visit all the blogs in the challenge just so I can say I did.
Here’s a list of my posts from April. Almost all of the posts are titles of Beatles songs. There are some letters that start a lot of titles and it was difficult to choose just one. There were some letters for which there are no Beatles songs that begin with that letter. {I can’t seem to come up with a less clunky way to phrase that.} In those cases I mostly resorted to songs from the members’ solo careers, or songs where the letter of the day is not the first letter of the title, but a prominent word nonetheless. The exceptions to using titles are K and Q; for those I used the names of a sound-alike band {Klaatu} that was rumored to be the Beatles and an earlier band {The Quarrymen} that included John, Paul, and George which was later renamed The Beatles.
- A Hard Day’s Night
- Blackbird
- Come Together
- Do You Want to Know a Secret
- Eight Days a Week
- Fixing a Hole
- Got to Get You into My Life
- Here, There and Everywhere
- I Want to Hold Your Hand
- Julia
- Klaatu
- Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
- Michelle
- Norwegian Wood
- Oh! Darling
- P.S. I Love You
- Quarrymen
- Revolution
- She’s Leaving Home
- Things We Said Today
- Across the Universe
- Vertical Man
- We Can Work It Out
- Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
- You Won’t See Me
- Zig Zag
Z. Another letter that I knew would give me trouble with this theme. And then I found this from George Harrison’s solo work. And it’s just so silly, I have to close with it.
Oh, George. It’s always the quiet ones….
You won’t see me, because I am invisible. Or because I am excellent at playing peek-a-boo.
I knew this letter would give me trouble. There aren’t a lot of words {and spare me the diatribes about “Xmas” not being a real word} that start with the letter X, and therefore it’s not easy to find song titles that start with X either.
But I got trouble I didn’t expect. I love this song. This video made me cry though. Seriously. How can we do things like this to each other?
Life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting. Except, far too often it seems we make time for that. I wonder why that is?
OK, this was just too weird not to include in this series. It’s from Ringo’s solo career {there aren’t any Beatles tracks that start with the letter V} and it features Ozzy Osbourne on backing vocals. I’m not even going to pretend I have more to say about it than that.
U is for Universe.
And A is for Apple, but not the Apple recording studios. Here’s a cover of the Beatles tune by Fiona Apple that was used on the soundtrack for the movie Pleasantville. I love that movie. I love this song. I love Fiona Apple.
I tell you, there’s love practically dripping all over the place right now. Enjoy.
Have I told you lately {or ever} that I love you?
Have you said, “I love you,” to the people that you love today? If not, stop reading right this second and do it.
