Love is probably the only emotion that we are so incapable of explaining; it requires absolutely no explanation. Look at someone like John Lennon. From an early age, he was given the entire world on a platter as every corner of the globe was filled with Beatles records and memorabilia. He had everything, but still, the process of falling in love was enough to get his heart racing and the songwriter acting in unprecedented ways.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono got married on March 20th, 1969. After their honeymoon in Paris, Lennon returned so exhilarated and full of love that he immediately knew he had to record his emotions. Even though two of the Beatles weren’t available, he dragged Paul McCartney to the studio and started putting his feelings to sound.
It’s understandable why Lennon wanted to act so quickly with this song. He had a lot of experience as a songwriter and no doubt understood that the most effective way to capture emotion in music adequately is to write when that emotion is still raw. There is no time to write about love quite like the honeymoon; as such, as soon as it was over, he was raring to go.
“It was very romantic,” Lennon said. “It’s all in the song, ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko,’ if you want to know how it happened, it’s in there.” The Beatle also talked about his wedding and how magical the evening was, “Gibraltar was like a little sunny dream. I couldn’t find a white suit – I had sort of off-white corduroy trousers and a white jacket. Yoko had all white on.”
The use of the word “dream” is interesting and may well be another reason why Lennon was so quick to write the song. A lot of the time, after having a dream, people will wake up remember it clear as day, but the more time that passes between the dream world and the waking world, the less apparent that dream becomes. As such, Lennon needed to act before the love-tinted mist had cleared.
Because the emotions he writes about are so raw, Lennon describes ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ less as a song and more as a piece of journalism. He reports what happened instead of creating a romantic and creative way to describe it. “I wrote it in Paris on our honeymoon. It’s a piece of journalism. It’s a folk song. That’s why I called it ‘The Ballad of.’”
There are few instances in the Beatle’s back catalogue where Lennon has taken this approach to writing music. He was always very calculated as a writer, and he took the time to ponder different things. However, with this tune, it was less about writing with his head and more about writing with his heart. His feelings had to come out there and then, and as such, the song we have today is as raw as the moment he wrote it.
