It’s bound to be difficult for any artist to look back on their songs with 100% confidence. There will always be little screwups here and there, and even if a song has stood the test of time, there’s a good chance that all that the artist hears is the moment when they were in the studio or the few bum notes left over at the very end of the take. While George Martin usually didn’t have that much of a problem turning in solid gold with The Beatles, he did admit that one song left John Lennon especially dissatisfied when looking back on everything.

Coming out of the whirlwind of the Fab Four, though, no one seemed more jaded than Lennon. After being known as a teenybopper star for the first part of his career, everything that he did in the first few years of his solo work felt like a deliberate attempt to move as far away from the traditional pop formula as possible, whether that meant laying his soul bare on Plastic Ono Band or showing the world his more delicate areas on the cover of Two Virgins.

After all, all good art was based on reality for Lennon, and that normally meant having the confidence to make something that could shake up the audience now and again. So, when looking at all of the orchestration put on many of The Beatles’ finest works, it’s no wonder why Lennon felt that he was a completely different person compared to the mop-topped poet who wrote ‘Love Me Do’.

But there were always pieces of Lennon’s real self coming out in his songs in his Beatles days. ‘Help!’ was one of the first autobiographical songs that he ever wrote, and even if he might not have kept it as close to the chest as many thought, ‘In My Life’ is still as close to a perfect song as anyone had made until that point, almost giving him a companion piece to Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’.