Credit: Far Out / Parlophone

How many songs did John Lennon write?

Thu 14 November 2024 16:30, UK

When the great David Bowie reflected on the work of his friend John Lennon, he defined his influence as thus: “I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock ‘n’ roll, and also ideas. I felt such akin to him in that he would rifle the avant-garde and look for ideas that were so on the outside of, on the periphery of what was the mainstream and then apply them in a functional manner to something that was considered popularist and make it work.”

Nothing defines this quite like the anthem ‘I Am a Walrus’. There are children still today who reply, ‘goo goo g’joob‘, to the prompt of the title despite the fact it is one of the most wildly avant-garde hits in history. Yet, alongside these far out fancies, Lennon was also capable of producing simple, earnest pop tracks like ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘Not a Second Time’. He could write them all. And his melodies were simply stunning.

He might have had a singular mind in these matters, but that didn’t stop him from being open to constant collaboration. The Beatles wrote and recorded 188 original songs between 1962 and 1970, and just about every single one of them was given a shared songwriting credit. This means that it is not always easy to fully decipher who wrote what and how the bulk of the idea was formed. Even the band members themselves would often dispute the share of a song’s ownership.

However, the safest figure to apply to Lennon’s output in The Beatles is 73. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney wrote a safe 71 as the lead writer, though it has to be noted that he often did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to bulking out bare-bones compositions delivered by his bandmates. This collaborative nature set the tone for the writing style that would pervade into Lennon’s solo work.

So, how many songs did John Lennon write in total?

“He was very open to suggestion and very easy to work with,” producer Jack Douglas recently told Far Out. “He took direction without any problem. He would let me comp his vocals [process of cutting pieces of vocal takes together] without being in the room saying this one or that one. He left it totally up to me. A lot of trust early on, he let me do arrangements on the songs from cassettes that he gave me. I arranged Double Fantasy with the rhythm section without him even being there.”

This approach rendered him prolific even though his life was cut short at 40, and a weekend was lost in that time. Liberated from The Beatles, he was also a little more carefree about his writing, with his solo period littered with dogeared demos, making it very difficult to put an exact figure on how many songs he wrote based on when you consider a song written.

Once again, the safest complete, catalogued and self-credited figure sits at 72, almost exactly the same number that he mustered with The Beatles a decade earlier. This makes the polished, lowest estimate for his output 145. Though it must be stressed, as with everything else about Lennon, what can be verifiable from the surface, masks an iceberg underneath.

No doubt, much like ‘Now and Then’, further demos and discarded discs will be uncovered over the years, and his output may well creep beyond the 200 mark, where some of the more generous, unverified estimates place it.