For a man with the world at his fingertips, John Lennon spent a great deal of his time putting pen to paper to conjure up lyrics. Both with The Beatles and as a solo artist, he touched upon various topics that reflected real-life events, complete fiction and a grey area between the two.
Lennon has a lot of lyrics to be proud of, but he was adamant that the best words he ever committed to the page were those which didn’t need a melody to be recognisable. “See, the ones I like are the ones that stand as words without melody,” he said. “They don’t have to have melody, like a poem; you can read them.”
According to The Beatles frontman, his best work came after arguing with his first wife. He was asked in an interview in 1970 what his favourite Beatles songs were, and he said: ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘I Am The Walrus’, ‘Girl’ and ‘Across The Universe’.
“It’s one of the best lyrics I’ve written,” said Lennon, speaking about ‘Across The Universe’. “In fact, it could be the best. It’s good poetry, or whatever you call it.”
The song was initially released on a compilation album featuring Cilla Black and Lulu called No One’s Gonna Change Our World in 1969. The song was re-released on the 1970 album Let It Be a year later. It’s considered one of The Beatle’s most famous songs despite not winning any awards or receiving critical acclaim.
Lennon married his first wife, Cynthia Lennon, in 1962. Six years later, he met Yoko Ono, which led to him divorcing Cynthia and marrying Yoko. The breakdown of his first marriage was a stressful time, and Lennon found songwriting a good way of coping with it.
“I was lying next to my first wife in bed,” he told Playboy, “You know, and I was irritated, and I was thinking. She must have been going on and on about something and she’d gone to sleep and I kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream.”
The lyrics that Lennon ended up writing were: “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup / they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe / pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind / possessing and caressing me.”
The lyrics are sweet-sounding and go well with the cosmic feel of the song; there is also a point to be made about the fact that even just written down, they can still be recognised as good lyrics. Even though the song didn’t do that well, it was sent literally across the universe as NASA beamed it into space. It’s appropriate to think that what John Lennon considers some of the best Beatles lyrics are going further than any others written.
