In our Memoir in a Melody series, Biographile writers examine the storytelling of well-known musicians, exploring the autobiographical elements of their famous songs.

Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?
Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day.
The sun is up, the sky is blue,
It’s beautiful, and so are you.

In 1967, the Beatles left rainy London for Rishikesh, India, to learn a new spiritual technique called Transcendental Meditation (or TM) from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an enlightened being in the tradition of Hindu gurus. The fab four from Liverpool weren't the only celebrities present, though: actress Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence were also there. The Beatles, though serious, to varying degrees, about their meditation practice, paled in comparison to the devotion Prudence Farrow exhibited. Lewis Lapham, famed journalist and author of the book With the Beatles, describes in his book an incident in which the Yogi asked his devotees to confess how many hours they had spent meditating that day. When he cast his gaze on Prudence and she shyly told the crowd she had managed twelve hours, everyone knew she was climbing the spiritual ladder faster than they were.

But Prudence’s fanaticism worried at least some people, among them John and Paul. Concerned she was spending too much time holed up in her room and might be depressed, McCartney and Lennon composed a sweet little love song to Prudence, in which they playfully asked her to come out and enjoy the nature around them. Farrow, who has a PhD in Sanksrit from Berkeley and continues to teach TM today, said she was flattered, but added, "As much as I appreciated their attention, I preferred to be left alone to meditate." The group returned to England and recorded the song in late August of 1968; Prudence didn’t hear it in full until it was released as part of The White Album.

This all took place in 1967, though, ten years after Paul McCartney and John Lennon met as teenagers at a Woolton Parish Church event in Liverpool. Curious as to how they ended up halfway around the world wearing orange flower necklaces and chanting mantras? Mark Lewisohn’s new opus Tune In: The Beatles, All These Years, Volume 1 starts before the beginning, chronicling the band members’ families from 1845 onward, linking the boys’ behaviors and personalities to their forbears. Lewisohn, a long-time Beatle-maniac whom the Guardian rightly labeled "the subject’s foremost authority," brings an academic tone and fastidious research to a topic and art form (rock music) that rarely gets a fair shake in the realm of serious studies.

He doesn't see his work as a rock biography, however. It's a "cultural history, with the Beatles at the center of it." For this reason, he also includes swathes of material about mid-century British economy, the geography of Liverpool (he relocated to the city from London for six months), and tidbits garnered from interviews with people only tangentially connected with the band. The book is so rich with detail that one tenth of its nearly-1,000 pages are dedicated to endnotes. It may sound overwhelming, but Lewisohn artfully shows how such context underscores the development of the band. As the 50^th anniversary of the Beatles’ landmark appearance on Ed Sullivan falls on February 9^th, you might just have enough time to finish this first installment of their definitive history. If so, there's enough detail to meditate over in the first volume while eagerly awaiting the second and third, priming you for all that's to come: from the British invasion and A Hard Day's Night to a spiritual awakening that would find them in India, pleading with Prudence Farrow to come out and play.