The song has so much happening that when I casually listen I feel the accumulated effect, but attempting to really figure out what’s going on, I fear may take the fun out of it. Liking songs is risky. They are aural fireflies, and you can get too close and lose them. If “A Day in the Life” is about anything, it speaks to the way the daily unfolding of worldly events touches the private fragilities of ordinary people. It’s Ulysses in a pop song, the typical day made unforgettable.

But here goes. What exactly is happening? In the best rock songs, you can almost see it. When Paul tells me that a girl was just 17 and I know what he means, in fact I don’t know what he means, which is the point. “A Day in the Life” is filled with a collage of images in enticing half focus. Lennon, the crowd, you, and I are all voyeurs, transfixed by something horrible, the newsworthy death. Everybody recognizes the victim but nobody knows exactly who he is. Was he a politician? When Lennon mentions the House of Lords, I always think of the Profumo scandal, which unfolded during that early-sixties period when politics began to merge with mass-media-driven celebrity in a way that undermined popular assumptions about Great Men. Whose day in the life is it, anyway? The crowd’s life or simply the singer’s? And is it still your life if your crucial experiences are received secondhand, from articles and cameras? Was Lennon himself so famous now that he was forced to live life from the passive privacy of an easy chair?

That’s how he was writing, beachcombing inspiration from headlines and news briefs in the January 17 Daily Mail, which he had open at his piano (for this song); from a circus poster hanging in his home (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”); from a cereal advertisement (“Good Morning Good Morning”); from his child’s drawing (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”). In the song, the young man whose death gets noticed in the newspaper references an acquaintance of the Beatles, a Guinness beer company heir named Tara Browne, who crashed his Lotus sports car at high speed. Lennon reimagines Browne into the half-recognizable, presumably upper-class man who has it made and then throws it all away. What does it say that one crowd is transfixed by a privileged stranger’s grisly demise, but another crowd rejects a film about the achievement of a generation, the world war won? Only the singer of the song is willing to go back there, and only because he’s read the book.

You want to go back there and you don’t. A perilous, self-destructive time is being evoked, along with a sense of emptiness, the desire for substance, for something to hold on to. Lennon might be the enemy of nostalgia, but he understands its appeal—and that it is no single feeling. Lennon didn’t like his voice, but the rest of us did because, as is true in this song, it seemed to have the features of several different voices at once—intimate, seductive, raspy, bemused, distanced, and pissed off. Listening to someone achieve that much emotional overlap in sound and depth within such a concentrated amount of space is thrilling.