Tune in Tuesday!

This is the "Let it Be: Naked" version of "The Long and Winding Road," said by Paul McCartney to be a truer version of the song than the one that was released with the original "Let it Be" album. Paul's voice is raw and clear, crooning about this symbolic road, "You left me waiting here a long, long time ago" is sentimental enough to move the listener to tears. The song is about the journeys we all take as people, and that sometimes, inevitably, we leave others we love behind. It's about losing touch, about needing someone in your life even after they are long gone. It's about deep, unrequited, inevitable love: "Why leave me standing here? let me know the way."

When my dad graduated from college in 1977, this is the lone song he played for himself in his room, because he had done it: he had plowed through the forest of his undergraduate career, ready to take on the world, as it were. It's appropriate for graduation, I think, because all of us feel sentimental about leaving a place, and about wanting to take that winding road back there, and the homesickness we know we will feel for a time place that will cease to exist in the same form for us ever again. Sure, we can return to campus, see old professors, perhaps friends that were younger, but it won't be the same.