It’s hard to imagine a songwriter as prolific as John Lennon having writer’s block. Since Paul McCartney boasted that the songwriting team never had a dry session when in The Beatles, Lennon was one to slave over lyrics, meticulously working until they were just right in the studio. Although Lennon would write meaningless words in the early days of The Beatles, the road to making Rubber Soul made for his major bout of writer’s block.
For the first half of their career together, Lennon and McCartney would often spend their days crafting songs that were nothing but throwaway love songs. Although Lennon admitted to never getting that much creative expression out of these tunes, things began turning a corner once he expanded his mind with drugs.
Being the first major drug album the group ever made, Rubber Soul was heavily influenced by the substances they were taking at the time, being high on marijuana for most of their downtime in the studio. With a rapid deadline approaching for the album, though, Lennon and McCartney start to write without each other for the first time in their career.
After trying to rest his mind, Lennon eventually recalled writing ‘Nowhere Man’ in just a few minutes, telling Rolling Stone, “I remember I was just going through this paranoia trying to get something and nothing would come out, so I just lay down and tried not to write, and then this came out”. Rather than the typical love song, Lennon had written more revealing than even he had intended.
Having felt straight-jacketed in his role as a Beatle, Lennon sees his life from an outsider’s perspective in this track, coyly asking if this “nowhere man” is a bit like you and me. While it may have been the most autobiographical song that Lennon had written until that point, it would take the other members to turn it into the spectacular recording we know today.
Once it was brought to the studio, the group added layers of vocal harmonies, which included different counterpoint melodies, especially when delving into the bridge where the backing “la-la-las” served as just as powerful a hook as Lennon’s lead vocal. Lennon even thought enough of the tune to play the guitar solo, doubling George Harrison’s lead on his new white Fender Stratocaster guitar.
Even though Lennon had written a powerful new song for the album, it tended to affect the next few years of his songwriting. No longer concerned with writing songs for bottom-of-the-barrel pop charts, Lennon would take his tunes into artsier directions, either playing with the metre on tracks like ‘Across the Universe’ or toying with various psychedelic effects on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
Given where Lennon was at the time, it’s easy to see that his passion for rock and roll was starting to slip away as well. In the next few years, Lennon would continue to write about his frail state of mind on tracks like ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, which expressed his weariness about being in the spotlight so often. While the rock world is better for Lennon not giving up on ‘Nowhere Man’, this could have been the first cry for help he wanted out of The Beatles.
