Creative fear is a specific and unusual emotion. It is not the fear of failure — most artists know that fear well and have developed relationships with it that are functional if not comfortable. Creative fear is the fear that arrives when something has succeeded beyond the limits of your own comprehension. When you have made something and the thing you have made is larger than your understanding of your own capability. When you look at what has come out and cannot fully account for how it got there.
The Beatles experienced this more than any other band in history. Not because they were more prone to self-doubt — if anything, the collective confidence of four people who had grown up making music together gave them a resilience that individual artists rarely have. But because the gap between what they had been doing and what they suddenly found themselves capable of was, at certain specific moments, so large that even they were not sure how to stand inside it.
1. “A Day in the Life.” When the final chord was struck — the massive, prepared-piano orchestral crash that closes the song and Sgt. Pepper’s — and the playback was run in the studio, the room went quiet in a way that producer George Martin has described across multiple interviews and in his memoir. Not the professional quiet of people evaluating a take. The deeper quiet of people in the presence of something they do not have adequate language for. Lennon has said that he felt the song had been made by something working through him rather than by him. That he was not sure he could have explained how it had come to be if asked.
2. “Eleanor Rigby.” McCartney brought the song to the band and they listened to the completed string arrangement — the one George Martin realized based on Paul’s specifications — for the first time together. The account of that listening comes from multiple sources who were present. The particular quality of surprise on McCartney’s face as he heard what his instincts had been reaching toward made concrete in orchestral sound. He has said that it was one of the only times in his creative life that the finished article exceeded his imagination of what it could be.
3. “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Lennon brought the lyric — drawn from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, elliptical and strange and unlike anything in the Beatles’ existing catalog — and what came out of the studio processing was something that nobody in the room had heard before. A sound that seemed to come from outside the decade they were making it in. The tape loops, the reversed guitar, the drums that sounded like something ancient and future simultaneously. They played it back and looked at each other with the specific expression of people who have wandered into territory without a map.
4. “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The composite version — two takes joined impossibly by George Martin at different speeds and different keys — was played back to the band and the reaction has been described consistently as one of stunned recognition. That the join, which should not have worked, worked perfectly. That the song that resulted was something none of them had individually envisioned. That it seemed to have assembled itself from their separate visions into something that transcended all of them.
5. “I Am the Walrus.” Lennon finished the lyric — deliberately nonsensical, a deliberate middle finger to the people who were subjecting Beatles lyrics to academic analysis — and what came out in the recording was not nonsense. It was something stranger and more powerful than sense. The orchestration, the choir, the radio fragment at the end — in combination it produced an experience that Lennon himself said he found difficult to listen to because it felt like being inside his own mind in a way he found uncomfortable. He made it anyway. It frightened him. He released it anyway.
The Beatles made music that frightened them five times that we know of. Probably more times than that. The difference between them and lesser artists was not that they were never afraid of what they were making.
It was that they released it anyway.