How John Lennon almost forgot about his masterpiece: “It wasn’t working at all”
Imagine if your favourite song simply never came to be – if the lyrics were never written, the music never made up, the track never recorded, and the world never got to know it. Perhaps music may never have been the same without some of the songs that shifted everything, opening new doors and pioneering new sounds. It opens up a whole world of possibilities caused by the butterfly effect of one missing song, or, in John Lennon’s case, one timeless track that was almost completely forgotten about.
There are plenty of these near misses in musical history. Nirvana almost abandoned ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, not thinking it was good enough. Leonard Cohen spent close to a decade trying to figure out ‘Hallelujah’, coming close to giving up many times. Several fan-favourite Radiohead songs were left off album tracklists for years and years, almost never released at all. Eventually, these songs came out and proved their worth to the hordes of fans who were thankful for them and the generations of listeners who carried these songs forward.
But in the story of The Beatles, perhaps the biggest near-miss doesn’t come down to insecurity or doubt but plain and simple forgetfulness. ‘In My Life’ was almost lost as Lennon wrote it once, completely forgot it, and then, luckily, wrote it again.
It was 1964 when the song first came to him. It was one of three Beatles classics inspired by the same bus route. It was the one that took the two songwriters to one another’s houses. Penny Lane, the street made infamous by the band, was once simply the station McCartney had to change it to get the next bus to Lennon’s, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was not just a childhood reflection for Lennon but was also tied into his collaborator’s memories too as the stop he’d get off at to see his friend. With this line drawn between them, ‘In My Life’ was inspired by the journey.
”‘In My Life’ started out as a bus journey from my house on 250 [sic] Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning every place I could remember. And it was ridiculous,” Lennon explained, but this was a 1964 draft. “It was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holidays Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all,” he said, and as he declared “I cannot do this!”, he abandoned the track.
For a year, it existed as nothing more than a forgotten bit of paper. Screwed up and tossed away, the track was nearly lost as the singer forgot those early lyrics and gave it up.
But, a year later, the same melody came back to him. Now a year deeper into their global fame, pulled further from these domestic sights and sounds as the musicians began to miss their home, the idea for ‘In My Life’ returned as something different. No longer blind to and bored of the scenes from the bus window as he listed them in his first draft, instead, the song became a tender remembrance for his home city as he immortalised the places he grew up and send his love to the people he knew.
Remembering the song he’d written a year ago but now handling it with more emotion and nostalgia, he created one of The Beatles’ sweetest tracks from the forgotten scraps.
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