How Bob Dylan helped John Lennon combat his own emotions
There was a significant turn in the way John Lennon approached songwriting in 1964. Before that, Lennon was more or less churning out love songs with an eye toward commercial viability and global outreach. The message at the centre of his lyrics could be pedestrian, rote, or even cheesy at times. It didn’t really matter: The Beatles were playing to teenagers, so they had to be writing simple songs with easily digestible content.
But Lennon’s own personal life began to emerge in his songs toward the end of that year. His depression and uncertainty came out in songs like ‘I’m a Loser’ and ‘I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party’. By 1965’s Rubber Soul, Lennon would take his biggest steps toward personal songwriting with the track ‘In My Life’. But before that, he would channel some of his less-savoury emotions on the Help! track ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’.
The song’s folky arrangement and poetic lyrics came from a clear source: Bob Dylan. The Beatles met Dylan in the summer of 1964, with the singer-songwriter fundamentally changing the way that the band saw their own music. Lennon, in particular, began to embrace some of Dylan’s musical traits, something that he copped to while discussing ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’.
“That’s me in my Dylan period again. I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on,” Lennon told David Sheff in the book All We Are Saying. “If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Dylan.”
“‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ is my Dylan period. It’s one of those that you sing a bit sadly to yourself, ‘Here I stand, head in hand…’ I’d started thinking about my own emotions,” Lennon would later explain, as he was quoted in the book version of Anthology. “I don’t know when exactly it started, like ‘I’m A Loser’ or ‘Hide Your Love Away’, those kind of things.”
As it turned out, Dylan’s biggest influence on Lennon wasn’t the latter’s embrace of folk music or purposefully obscure lyrics. Instead, Lennon put down a barrier that he had previously established in his songwriting. Thanks to Dylan, Lennon became more comfortable singing about himself in his material.
“Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself, which I’d done in my books,” Lennon explained. “I think it was Dylan who helped me realise that – not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work.”
Check out ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ down below.
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