Music writer Rob Sheffield has always willfully ignored the line between critic and fanatic, and his books serve as breaths of fresh air in the otherwise stuffy world of rock-dude pontificating. Sheffield’s style is exuberant and heartfelt, like a tipsily shouted discussion you’d have hovering over the jukebox with a close friend. Dreaming the Beatles, Sheffield’s book-length consideration of the most famous band in history, doesn’t veer from this approach, which means it ping-pongs between game-changing insights and laughably wrongheaded pronouncements. That Sheffield fully owns his takes, whether dead-on or wholly misguided, makes the book a likeable, effortless read.
Dreaming the Beatles’ thesis, ostensibly, is to examine the evergreen appeal of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and why subsequent generations keep falling for them. It doesn’t really answer this question—how could it?—but Sheffield has affection for the band to spare, enough to convert a few decades’ worth of new recruits. “I have lived a full and happy life,” he writes. “But being born on the same planet as the Beatles is one of the 10 best things that’s ever happened to me.”