Reflections on John Lennon's passing

Thirty-five years after John Lennon's death, I still have many of the same thoughts I had decades ago.  Obviously, above all else, my main recurring thought is, "How does anyone ever have the audacity to kill another person with absolutely no justification?"  In addition:

• So much has been written about Lennon's standout Beatles and solo tracks.  "Across The Universe," in my view, deserves a special mention.  Its unusual structure and lyrics that stay on the same chord for a good, long while and keep building without a breath make it a refreshing, unusual, and difficult-to-sing highlight of his career.
• One of Lennon's most infectious melodies, to my ears, is "The Ballad Of John And Yoko."  Vocally and instrumentally, it's among his best uptempo efforts.  Although it might sound like an odd segue, I paired it with a Lucinda Williams track, "Big Red Sun Blues," on a mix CD I made for myself years ago.  Listen to those tunes back to back, and you'll hear a melodic similarity.
• It's reassuring to hear so much of John's voice in his son, Julian.  This is especially apparent on Julian's hit, "Valotte." 
• George Harrison's "All Those Years Ago" is a well-written and compellingly sung tribute to Lennon.  It's not the kind of hit you hear on the radio today, as its sentimentality, nostalgia, and mention of God in the lyrics are very of their time, but it still deserves airplay today.  In my opinion, it's one of Harrison's strongest solo tracks.
• I remember finding it ironic that my fourth grade teacher was the first authority figure to break the news of Lennon's death.  At the time, I was in private school for my one and only semester, and I thought, "If the next equivalent of John Lennon is sitting in a classroom like this, at a school that doesn't value the arts all that much, (s)he might still be successful.  If (s)he is, however, it will be in spite of the arts education here, not because of it."  The school had no instrumental music program, no art teacher, unless you counted each homeroom teacher who periodically assigned projects involving construction paper, and a vocal music teacher with no classroom of her own, who wheeled her supply cart from class to class and would sometimes say at the end of class, "Stand up and say thank you to me!"

It's reassuring to see that after all these decades, the general public still appreciates the vast Lennon-McCartney canon and likely will for decades to come.  Many singer-songwriters affect listeners emotionally, but very few ever have (or likely will) resonate with listeners on the scale that John Lennon and Paul McCartney have.  I write this, knowing that these are two of the safest statements I've penned on this blog so far.