Almost exactly one year ago (somewhere this week) I actively started listening to The Beatles. Of course, I knew who the Beatles were and had heard their music, but I never bothered to really listen to this little band from Liverpool.

My earliest memory of a Beatles song is "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da". Back then I didn't know it was a song by them. Back then I didn't know any band, really.
I was about 7 or 8 years old, still in primary school. I remember singing this song a few times, along with "Drunken Sailor" (or "What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor"). It was just one of the handful of English songs we were thought.

[Insert a boring, and perhaps embarrassing, paragraph here about my musical taste way before the Beatles, including bands like Linkin Park, blink-182 and Avril Lavigne.I was listening to Animal Collective and of Montreal right before the Beatles. Still dig 'em.]

I was getting bored of constantly listening to the same music. There were 40 songs in my Limewire (p2p program) folder which were on repeat for weeks, if not months. I was browsing on Wikipedia and, as what always happens when I'm on Wikipedia, tabs were beginning to pile up in my Firefox window. Little did I know that in between all those tabs was a page that would literally change my life.

"The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". It was a page on an article by Rolling Stone, published in November '03. I don't think I read the page itself; I just went onto the External Links part and clicked the link leading to the magazine's website. So, here I was, on a page filled with artists of which I had either never heard or barely heard of. Naturally, I began reading the the review for the #1 on the list; Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I sifted through the review while already downloading "the most important rock & roll album ever made".

I stuffed the 13 songs in a WMP playlist and put on my headphones and started playing the album. I don't remember much of it, really, except that I got bored and stopped listening in the middle of Harrison's "Within You Without You". Wait, what? This was the magnum opus of the greatest rock & roll group of all time? Really? I had heard albums that I thought were much, much better. I did dig three songs, though, and I had those on repeat for a few days; "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", "With A Little Help From My Friends" and "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds". The first three songs on the album. I explicitly remember telling my friend "It's nothing special. I mean, it's alright and all, but nothing special."

I decided to give the four lads from Liverpool another chance by watching some videos on Youtube. I think I watched about 3 or so, but none of them really didn't do anything. Until "Lady Madonna" started playing. The piano started rocking in the beginning and you know when the vocal, bass and drums come in at about 8 seconds? Yeah, that was it. Those first 10 seconds did everything for me. It was life-altering, really. I went on STMusic.org in search of Beatles albums and I found a .torrent which had all the albums (294 files, 856.60MB). I left the computer on all night, something I almost never do, and went to bed.

The next day would be the first day of my Beatlemania of non-stop Beatles. And by non-stop, I literally mean non-stop. Sure, there were some songs sent by friends which I checked on Youtube, but other than that it was all Beatles. An eargasm which lasted almost 5 months (November 19th till April 9th).

I started with Please Please Me and just went on to Let It Be, I think. I remember not liking the White Album and onwards. Again, I told my friend that it was just some standard 60s/70s/80s rock which I really didn't dig. I got this feeling after hearing songs like "Birthday". I couldn't have been more wrong.
I did really like the albums before the White Album, though. I really liked their early, poppy stuff and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was steadily going higher in my list of all-time favorite albums. In the meantime I already ordered one of my favorite movies, A Hard Day's Night (November 22nd, '07). You won't believe how many times I said to myself, "Hey, I know this song!" and "This is the Beatles? Oooooh."

So, days became weeks, and weeks became months. As bands like The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys and The Kinks started to pile up on my “This is what I'm going to listen to next”-list, I still couldn't really give a damn about listening anything except for something these five Gods made. The variety in their music is simply amazing. And that's an understatement. To know that five persons can make such a body of work in just 7 years, is mind blowing. Yes, I said “five”. I had to include George Martin.

Somewhere in the first week of April I stumbled across a page of an avid '60s listener who has a great taste (ForEmily), and I just browsed through his massive list of bands. Somewhere on the 150th place or something (not sure), was a fairly unknown band named Kaleidoscope (the British one). I looked up a song, “Flight From Ashiya”, on Youtube and got hooked. It reminded me of Animal Collective, a band I still like. So, I downloaded their album, Tangerine Dream, and that was pretty much the end of my Beatlemania (April 9th).
Well, actually, more like the end of my non-stop Beatlestreak. I started listening again the next night and the Beatles were still topping all my weekly charts by far, so yeah. However, I wasn't only listening to the Beatles anymore, and I finally began listening to the aforementioned bands.

As I said, the Beatles have had a massive impact on my life, so here's a short list:
- Musical taste. Yeah, obvious. Look at my page and try to find a band or artist who is in no way related to the '60s. There's probably none.
- Vinyl. I started collection (and listening, durrr) vinyl in september. So far I have about 50 vinyls, and in my collection are 26 Beatle records. Studio, compilation, stereo, mono, I try to get as much as possible. My parents did have some old records, but only one Beatle record (The Beatles – Love Songs; the brown one). My mom was more into “black” music, and, if anything, they both preferred the Rolling Stones over the Beatles. Can you believe that?
- Guitar. I picked up guitar playing somewhere in March. I bought an Epiphone Les Paul with, of course, a classic sunburst finish because I saw that quite a few times when I was watching stuff from the '60s.
- Clothing. Couldn't save myself from buying a coat like theirs on Beatles For Sale. I believe that kind of coat is called a “caban”.
- Hair. Oh yeah.
- Drugs. I won't ever take heroin, cocaine, xtc or even marihuana, but I can't help myself being curious about LSD. I'm not saying I'm ever going to take a hit, but I'm certainly not ruling it out anymore.
- English. I hated the English accent, but I don't anymore. And I've found myself using a lot of “, really” and “and all that” in my sentences now. Thank you, mr. Harrison.
- DDR/Guitar Hero/Rock Band. Guess I'm gonna have to learn to play games like this if I want to rock with the Beatles in that upcoming Rock Band-ish game. I really hate games like these, but we'll see how that goes.

So, that's it. One year of Beatles. At the time of writing I have scrobbled 31,761 songs. According to the Last.fm Normaliser, that's 84,699 minutes, or 1412 hours, or 59 days, or 2 months. I'm not even including all the time I've listened on my MP3-player (not an iPod). You could add another 10 to 15,000 songs then, I think. And they're still topping nearly all of my weekly charts after all this time.

The Beatles are the greatest band ever.