It’s bound to be difficult for any artist to look back on their songs with 100% confidence. There will always be little screwups here and there, and even if a song has stood the test of time, there’s a good chance that all that the artist hears is the moment when they were in the studio or the few bum notes left over at the very end of the take. While George Martin usually didn’t have that much of a problem turning in solid gold with The Beatles, he did admit that one song left especially dissatisfied when looking back on everything.
Coming out of the whirlwind of the Fab Four, though, no one seemed more jaded than Lennon. After being known as a teenybopper star for the first part of his career, everything that he did in the first few years of his solo work felt like a deliberate attempt to move as far away from the traditional pop formula as possible, whether that meant laying his soul bare on Plastic Ono Band or showing the world his more delicate areas on the cover of Two Virgins.
After all, all good art was based on reality for Lennon, and that normally meant having the confidence to make something that could shake up the audience now and again. So, when looking at all of the orchestration put on many of The Beatles’ finest works, it’s no wonder why Lennon felt that he was a completely different person compared to the mop-topped poet who wrote ‘Love Me Do’.
But there were always pieces of Lennon’s real self coming out in his songs in his Beatles days. ‘Help!’ was one of the first autobiographical songs that he ever wrote, and even if he might not have kept it as close to the chest as many thought, I
s still as close to a perfect song as anyone had made until that point, almost giving him a companion piece to Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’.
Any ordinary song would never be enough for Lennon, though, and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was about as personal as he ever got. Considering how he used to play in the aforementioned garden near his house, the song was the perfect bridge between their songwriting and experimental sides, almost like they’re taking the listener down a rabbit hole the minute that the first chorus starts.
While Martin managed to do the impossible on the song by making two takes in different keys fit together, he remembered Lennon telling him that he wanted to do it over again, saying, “He said, ‘If I had it my way, I’d do it all over again’. I said, ‘What, a song like ‘Strawberry Fields’?’, and he said, ‘Especially ‘Strawberry Fields’. It seemed that John always had this ideal that could never quite be reached. He had a picture in his mind that was always better than reality.”
Looking back on what his solo career was like, Lennon could have easily made something different had he had the right tools to work with. Outside of his collaborations with Harry Nilsson, his contributions to David Bowie songs like ‘Fame’ could have given him a partner in crime to work off of to turn what he considered a feeble recording of his finest song into something that no one had ever heard before.
Then again, maybe it’s for the best that Lennon never got around to taking another stab at his masterpieces. We all saw how Give My Regards To Broad Street worked out with Paul McCartney, so there’s a good chance that Lennon could have ended up indirectly botching some of his classics.