As arguably one of the greatest songwriters of our time, it’s hard to pick the best John Lennon song ever. So many different titles come to mind, both throughout his time with The Beatles and during his solo career, but a tune that will often rank highly on every fan’s list is ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. It turns out there might be a good reason for that, as the song took him over six weeks to finally get right and involved a tremendous amount of soul-searching.
In 1966, Lennon was cast by Dick Lester in the movie How I Won The War. Lennon played the role of Private Gripweed and started writing the song in between takes. “I was writing it all the time I was making the film,” he said, “As anybody knows about film work, there’s a lot of hanging around.”
The song started as a venture into the past as Lennon leaned into nostalgia to imagine somewhere close to him. “I’ve seen Strawberry Field described as a dull, grimy place next door to him that John imagined to be a beautiful place,” said McCartney when asked about the song, “But in the summer it wasn’t dull and grimy at all: it was a secret garden. John’s memory of it wasn’t to do with the fact that it was a Salvation Army home; that was up at the house. There was a wall you could bunk over and it was a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in.”
As Lennon had time to reflect on the material, though, the meaning gradually shifted, and that look into the past became much more introspective, partly fuelled by the power of reminiscing but accompanied by LSD-tinted glasses. The song is one of reflection, but reflection clouded by hallucinogenic sensations; in other words, “nothing is real”.
“The second line goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree,’” said Lennon, “Well, I think I was trying to say in that line is ‘nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius’… What I’m saying, in my insecure way, is ‘Nobody seems to understand where I’m coming from. I seem to see things in a different way from most people.’”
Looking too much into the past and self-assessing during that search can lead people down a rabbit hole. It seems this happened to Lennon when writing ‘Strawberry Fields’ hence why it took so long to finish and why it is such a raw telling that fans connect with. Lennon even described it and ‘Help!’ as “one of the few true songs I ever wrote… they were the ones I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it.”
The time Lennon put into this song and his sheer vulnerability throughout its conception and subsequent analysis is likely why it is one of the stand-out Beatles tunes from their vast discography.
