For someone who was so omnipresent in pop music throughout his career, it feels like we still haven’t figured out what made John Lennon tick. Whether he was in The Beatles or doing zany experiments with Yoko Ono, every move that he made felt like a document of how he was at the time and nothing more. But while Plastic Ono Band saw him open himself up to his fans for the first time, ‘How’ is the most accurate description Lennon ever gave regarding his innermost feelings.

Because looking at some of the other songs on Imagine, it’s hard to get a handle on what kind of person he wants to be. The title track is still a perfect prayer for humanity to be kind to one another, and yet elsewhere on the record, there are tunes like ‘How Do You Sleep’ where Lennon goes after Paul McCartney in one of the most vicious tirades that have ever been put to tape.

But to understand ‘How’, we have to dial things back to Plastic Ono Band and look at what was unpacked there. Before even joining The Beatles, Lennon never had it easy as a youngster, and hearing him unload everything regarding his familial issues on ‘Mother’ or his struggles with religion on ‘God’ is enough to make even the most devoted family man start to empathise for a few seconds.

From the very beginning of his life, Lennon had already struggled with his relationship with his mother and father, and a lot of his anger ended up stemming from how he was treated by them. While he doesn’t try to excuse some of the despicable behaviour that he described in ‘Jealous Guy’, it’s a lot easier to get the full picture when listening to the way ‘How’ came to be.

So, what happened during John Lennon’s childhood?
Looking back on his childhood, Lennon was already separated from his father and was forced to choose who to spend his life with while he was barely out of diapers. Even when he chose to live with his mother, having to live at his aunt’s while his mother was treated like a friend of the family was going to do nothing for his abandonment issues. So now that he had his head screwed on, ‘How’ was a way of defending his actions over the past few years.

Going through every line, Lennon talks about the troubles that he has dealing with his emotions, knowing that he has a warped view of true compassion. For a man who had written years before that, all we needed was love, it’s beautifully introspective to hear him sing a line like ‘How can I give a love if I don’t know what it is I’m giving?’.

But does that get him off the hook for his violence towards women and constant anger issues? Well, it’s not that black and white. As much as Lennon let out his anger and aggressive ways and committed unspeakable actions that should be looked at as dark parts of his life, the fact that he was willing to tell everyone that he wasn’t a role model is all that can be asked of someone trying to better themselves.

Looking at the final verses, Lennon uses the song to help himself as much as the listener, reminding himself that he has to be strong to make it through life and still find ways to be happy. He may have admitted to being on his own in ‘God’, but he knows enough about himself to realise that if he can rest his head at night content with himself, then that was all that mattered.

Which makes it all the more tragic when Lennon couldn’t make it right with his son, Sean, after his assassination in 1980. He had only begun to find out what it means to give real love and be willing to accept love in return, and yet that beating heart was put to rest right as it began to heal itself.