Over the course of his career, John Lennon worked with many musicians. The Beatles brought in other musicians to play on their songs, and he collaborated with many artists in his solo career. Despite this, Lennon said he found it difficult to talk about music with other artists. He explained that he relied on producer George Martin to do this for him because he was too shy.
John Lennon said he found it challenging to talk to musicians
In the early 1960s, The Beatles began working with Martin. He helped transform their music and bring their visions to life.
“George Martin had a very great musical knowledge and background, and he could translate for us and suggest a lot of things,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “He’d come up with amazing technical things, slowing down the piano and things like that. We’d be saying, ‘We want it to go un, un and ee, ee,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, look, chaps, I thought of this, this afternoon, and last night I was talking to… whoever, and I came up with this.’ And we’d say, ‘Great, great, come on, put it on here.’”
Lennon said that Martin’s musical knowledge also improved their music. He was able to introduce instruments they didn’t know existed into their music.
“In ‘In My Life’ there’s an Elizabethan piano solo — we’d do things like that,” Lennon said, “We’d say, ‘Play it like Bach,’ or, ‘Could you put twelve bars in there?’”
Martin also helped talk to the other musicians on their records. Lennon admitted this was something he struggled to do himself.
“He helped us to develop a language a little, to talk to musicians,” he said. “Because I’m very shy and for many, many reasons I didn’t much go for musicians, I didn’t like to have to go and see twenty guys and try and tell them what to do. They’re all so lousy, anyway.”
John Lennon liked what other musicians brought to ‘In My Life’
Though Lennon didn’t know how to talk to these other musicians, he recognized they made the song “In My Life” stronger. The song meant a lot to him, as it was one of his first introspective pieces.
“‘In My Life’ was, I think, my first real, major piece of work,” he said. “Up until then it had all been glib and throw-away. I had one mind that wrote books and another mind that churned out things about ‘I love you’ and ‘you love me’ because that’s how Paul and I did it. I’d always tried to make some sense of the words, but I never really cared.”
Martin also played on the song, adding a piano solo that Lennon enjoyed.
“There’s a bit where John couldn’t decide what to do in the middle and, while they were having their tea break, I put down a baroque piano solo which John didn’t hear until he came back,” Martin said. “What I wanted was too intricate for me to do live, so I did it with a half-speed piano, then sped it up, and he liked it.”
Ringo Starr said working with new instruments was proof they’d grown up as artists
In the mid-1960s, The Beatles’ sound developed, and they began working with new sounds and instruments. Ringo Starr believed this was a sign of their growing maturity as artists.
“It was such a mind-blower that we had this strange instrument on a record,” he said of the sitar on the song “Norwegian Wood.” “We were all open to anything when George introduced the sitar: you could walk in with an elephant, as long as it was going to make a musical note. Anything was viable. Our whole attitude was changing. We’d grown up a little, I think.”
