John Lennon is late 

The other 3 Beatles are sitting around waiting for him. Paul McCartney is lounging with his bass. He plugs it in. He begins to strum, almost absent-mindedly. He hums. He strums and he hums. He tries a phrase. He repeats it. George Harrison and Ringo Starr look on bored. Ringo looks like he is trying to shake the sleep out of his eyes, George is openly yawning.

Then something shifts. The strumming stops being casual. A shape appears. A melody that feels like it comes from elsewhere. The opening of the song Get Back begins to announce itself. 

Ringo starts clapping along, George snaps to attention, he plugs in his guitar, plays along and starts offering suggestions. Ringo moves to the drums. John eventually wanders in, he plugs in and slips into the groove like it was already there, joins in without missing a beat.  

And then, this half-slouching, half-humming becomes a global hit..and a key track in the rock pantheon

This scene is from The Beatles: Get Back Peter Jackson’s documentary, filmed during a few tense weeks in 1969 when they were trying to pull a new live show and album into existence.

The premise of the project was pressure. They were trying to pull together new material for both on a short runway. And yet what strikes me, watching it, is how playful they still are. Yes there is stress around the edges yet they spend a ridiculous amount of time circling songs they love. They get into old influences, half finished fragments. They spend hours on what looks like goofing off

We love the myth of inspiration arriving fully formed. The lightning bolt. The divine download. But if you watch closely, you can see the real ingredients. The shared language. The repetition. The willingness to bring something in that is not ready. The ease of criticism that does not become contempt. It looks effortless because the effort has already been paid for, spread across years

That is what I envy. Not fame. Not even talent, exactly. But the Freedom.

Not freedom as laziness.. But the freedom here is the freedom where uncertainty is allowed to exist long enough to become something. Brian Eno once lamented that we dont find uncertainty charismatic and that he wanted to cultivate a “charisma of uncertainty”, the charisma of admitting you are making it up as you go along.

Watching that scene, I think that is what I am really seeing. A charisma and a sureity in their weirdness. And what makes them so compelling is not their certainty, not their polish but something rarer. A group of people whose charisma leaps off the screen precisely because they are making it up as they went along

The dynamic between The Beatles is legendary, sometimes for the wrong reasons. Given their rock star personalities and massive egos. A dynamic that unravelled in their final months together. 

But when it came to songwriting, their competitiveness had a strange discipline. They made the songs compete. They were ruthless critics of each other’s work, but not of each other.

Paul McCartney once described the Lennon-McCarnety partnership with a kind of disarming maturity: if one of them said he didn’t like a bit, the other agreed. It just didn’t matter that much. He cared about being a songwriter, but he didn’t care passionately about each song. Not because the song didn’t matter, but because it didn’t matter who got the credit for making it good. 

You can hear that ethos in the way “A Day in the Life” came together (recorded during the Sargent Pepper sessions in 1967). John Lennon arrives with an opening world somewhat intact. “I read the news today, oh boy.” The tone is already there. The mood. The mixture of detachment and grief.

And then, instead of guarding territory, the song makes room for another world entirely. Paul brings in a scrap of his own, a little bouncy domestic vignette that he had nowhere to house: woke up, got out of bed. They don’t debate ownership. They don’t stop to define what the song is “supposed” to be. They stitch the worlds together, and then they do something even more revealing: They record it before they know how it will work.

They deliberately leave an empty section, a 24-bar gap, and treat it as a space to be filled later. As if the uncertainty is not a flaw, but necessary. In the earliest version, you can even hear the bars being counted (by their roady Mal Evans), the void just being held open.

This is the part that feels like freedom to me. Not freedom as indulgence. Freedom as a shared refusal to panic when the work is unfinished. Freedom as the confidence to say: we do not yet know what goes here, but we trust that something will.

Schopenhaur described genius as hitting a target no one can see. But for the Beatles, their “genius moments” are not really moments at all. They had the ability (and the luxury) and the discipline to keep the half-formed alive long enough for form to arrive.

The twenty-four bars of emptiness did not stay empty for long. With that emptiness, with that gap, a promise was made to the future. And with that promise came trust, a trust that something will arrive, even if it hasnt arrived yet. But the harder question becomes: what kind of thing belongs here? 

John Lennon had an answer that was more vibes and emotional than musical. He asked George Martin for “a tremendous build-up, from nothing up to something absolutely like the end of the world.” It is an absurd instruction if you take it literally. They decided to bring in an orchestra. Paul McCartney wanted the musicians to improvise, to climb from their lowest notes to their highest and to do it in a way that felt wild, human, unrepeatable. The problem, as Martin understood immediately, is that classically trained musicians are not paid to behave like wild improvisational rock stars. So he built a container for the chaos: a loose score that told the orchestra where to start, where to end, and roughly how to get there, while still encouraging them to invent the route. 

There is a lesson here about freedom in that it is not the absence of constraints. It is the right constraint, the kind that gives you permission to take the leap without breaking your neck.

Then they did the most Beatles thing..that looks like theatre. But is actually engineering

The orchestral session took place in Studio One. It was treated like an event, a small carnival. Friends were invited, including members of The Rolling Stones. John handed out party hats, fake noses, carnival spectacles to everyone including the orchestral players, who wore costume pieces over their tuxedos. The message being: tonight you are allowed to be ridiculous.

The Beatles, almost 10 years into their working relationship, never lost their sense of play. They knew innately that play is a precursor to innovation. And also, if you ask people to do something that might make them look foolish, you have to protect them from shame. You have to make it safe to sound wrong for the chance of sounding true

And somewhere in the middle of all this, you can see what “freedom” really looks like in practice. It is not a lack of deadlines. It is not a vague permission to be creative. It is a group of people who keep manufacturing the conditions that let the half-formed become real: socially, musically, technically.

Every creative process has a moment where the room needs to go quiet again. 

After the orchestral swell, after the carnival and the engineering and the bravado, you still have to decide how it ends. Endings are where you feel the tug. Part of you wants to land it. Part of you wants to keep it alive a little longer.

They tried one ending first: a communal hum, the band holding a single note together as if the song could dissolve back into breath. It didn’t land. It wasn’t wrong exactly, but it wasn’t inevitable. So they let it go. They discarded an idea they had already invested in, which is one of the clearest signs of a mature creative culture: the willingness to abandon what is merely interesting in service of what feels true

So they made the hard call: scrap the clever ending and commit to one final chord, held so long you can hear papers rustle and a chair squeak in the room.

A single E-major chord, struck together on multiple pianos, then kept alive by riding the recording level as the sound decays, stretching the fade into something like a long, strange meditation 

To me this matters beyond music. This is for all creative work (which is all work) 

Leo Tolstoy had a brutal, beautiful test for art. The point is transmission. Art passes a lived feeling from one nervous system to another, until the other person feels it too

That is what meaningful work looks like at its best. Taking something half-formed, protecting it from shame long enough to give it shape, then letting it go so it can reach another person

There’s a line in Robert Greene’s Mastery that fits here: He says true masters feel the answer before they can explain it in words. The Masters sense the right move before they can fully explain it. Judgment as a kind of felt knowing. Where right and wrong isnt a binary choice but a felt choice. I think of that final chord when I read that. The decision is technical, sure, but it is also felt. The body knows before the brain can give a lecture

But the Beatles freedom wasn’t a gift. It was earned. Bought with years of repetition and exposure, long nights playing until music lived in their bones, including the brutal residencies in Hamburg

So when you watch them “begin”,  when Paul finds a song while half-slouching with a bass in his lap,  it only looks like it comes from nowhere. It comes from a deep seedbed: all those covers, all that listening, all those hours stealing from every genre with open hands.

Which is why I keep coming back to freedom. But not freedom as laziness, or vibes, or infinite option-paralysis. Freedom as a room where uncertainty is allowed to exist long enough to become something.

Viktor Frankl names the distinction cleanly: it is not freedom from conditions, it is freedom to take a stand toward them

The Beatles had constraints: time, expectations, personalities, money.  But inside that, they built a culture: make the songs compete, don’t make each other the enemy; stay playful longer than is comfortable; treat the studio as a place to try things; let the unfinished sit on the table without panic.

That's the lesson I’m really trying to steal for our working lives: Meaningful creative work is not a perfect system. It is a shared practice that protects the fragile early version of an idea until it becomes real enough to transmit.

Not just to impress people.

To move them.

This essay is highly influenced by Ian Leslie’s book: John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs. Also:

Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (Project Gutenberg full text; “infection/transference” idea): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64908/64908-h/64908-h.htm