Some more words about Sgt. Pepper.

You wouldn't know it looking outside this morning, but yesterday in St. Charles, it was unseasonably warm - 60s! In February! - one of those days that make people forget about that whole climate change nonsense because it's such a nice day. And now it's raining and overcast. 

Anyway, the first warm day of the season is always an important day, as everyone cleans the winter cobwebs from their mind, stretch their legs and enjoy the outdoors like they will never come again. For me, I always place a special spot for that first album I play as I go out into the sunshine. With everyone's mood on the rise, the sunniest pop record just sounds sunnier.

While in the past, I've relied on Chutes Too Narrow by the Shins to usher in spring, this year, I didn't dig too deep at all. Out of the blue, I had the song "Fixing a Hole," in my head. And that was that. I'm going to listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, I thought. I hadn't pulled that CD out in a long time.

There's not much more that can be said about the album's influence and artistic successes, but something struck me as I listened to it on my way to work. For such a monolithic, seismic album, it felt very light, almost weightless. Like most people of my generation, the Beatles were already a done deal by the time we could comprehend what music was. I'm one of countless people raised on their records - I had all the words to Help! memorized by the time I was six. When I first learned to play guitar, Beatles songs were musts. The band has become so engrained into the fabric of popular consciousness, it's almost like they're not even there. A Beatles song is just a part of the air.

Any other contender for my personal favorite album of all time feels far more weighted down with purpose and meaning by contrast. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Radiohead's Kid A, my high school touchstones, recall a specific time and place and grand emotion.

Sgt. Pepper might recall, at best, a ride in the mini-van to the library or church as a child. The songs are so engrained into the mind that it doesn't even register that four English guys bothered to sit down, write them and record them in such a specific way. It just sounds so effortless and natural, like they've always been there and always will be. The Beatles are a modern equivalent to those old folk and blues standards that artists would just play and reinterpret over and over again.