John Lennon never stood still as a songwriter. He constantly tried to find ways to improve his craft and refused to accept mediocrity. With The Beatles, he could have been blinded by their meteoric success and tried to repeat a formula, but that was never Lennon’s approach.
Within him, there was always a storyteller. However, it took several years for Lennon to possess the tools to express these instincts. Like any other craft, it takes phenomenal effort to get right, and Lennon had to familiarise himself with failure before he finally struck gold. The Beatles singer was incredibly harsh about his own work, which worked in his favour throughout his career.
If Lennon believed his lyrics were not up to scratch, he was unafraid to return to the drawing board and start over again. Having an initial idea for a song is vital, but if it wasn’t executed to the top of Lennon’s capabilities, then he wasn’t content. This mindset was pivotal to Lennon’s brilliance, which was the spark that led to the creation of ‘In My Life’ by The Beatles. The track appeared on 1965’s groundbreaking Rubber Soul and marked a step forward for the Fab Four. In the lyrics, Lennon reflects on his childhood, which he’d previously avoided as a source of inspiration. Therefore, due to the emotional heft that he crammed into every line of ‘In My Life’, it meant more to Lennon than any other song he’d previously written.
The introspective track finds Lennon taking the listener on a guided tour of his hometown. It was the first track he wrote about his life, marking a tonal shift in his approach to music. He was now taking a glance in the mirror at the pivotal moments that helped him morph into the man he became.
The first version of ‘In My Life’ was designed to replicate a bus journey, with Lennon naming pivotal moments in his life and the places where these events occurred as he inched closer to his destination. While the idea was strong, Lennon, by his own admission, didn’t do it justice. He explained to David Sheff in 1980: “‘In My Life’ started out as a bus journey from my house on 250 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning every place that I could remember, and it was ridiculous.”
Lennon elaborated: “This is before even ‘Penny Lane’ was written and I had Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Tram Sheds — Tram Sheds are the depot just outside of Penny Lane — and it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did on My Holidays Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all.”
Rather than give up and move on to the next song, Lennon returned to ‘In My Life’, which morphed into a track that detailed the significance of the people of Liverpool, rather than merely naming places in the city. For Lennon, it was a triumph signalling his growth as a songwriter.
In the same interview, he noted: “For ‘In My Life’, I had a complete set of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic vision of a trip from home to downtown on a bus naming every sight. It became ‘In My Life’, which is a remembrance of friends and lovers of the past. Paul helped with the middle eight musically. But all lyrics written, signed, sealed, and delivered. And it was, I think, my first real major piece of work”.
Lennon brutally analysed his songs before ‘In My Life’ as being “sort of glib and throwaway”, which are words he’d never use regarding the Rubber Soul composition. “And that was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric. Inspired by Kenneth Allsop, the British journalist, and Bob Dylan,” he proudly added.
The first draft of ‘In My Life’ was a learning curve for Lennon, but through the editing process, he was able to achieve his goals for the song and showcase his credentials as a serious songwriter. Despite being strictly about his own life, though not naming the people or places that inspired his words, Lennon managed to make ‘In My Life’ feel universal, which is at the heart of its appeal.
