The Beatles song John Lennon called “the gift of God”
No one truly understands creativity. No amount of brain scans or research can fully explain how or why inspiration strikes, where it comes from, or how it transforms into something entirely new. Give a thousand artists the same prompt, and you’ll get a thousand different results—but why? To some, it has to come from somewhere beyond, something higher. Even John Lennon once credited God for one Beatles song.
The idea that a higher power plays a role in art has been around forever. In ancient times, they were called muses—spirits believed to whisper inspiration to a chosen few. To be an artist was to act as a translator for God, a conduit through which some greater force spoke. But in the chaos of rock and roll, a world with no fixed beliefs, that idea faded. Instead, we started seeing the artists themselves as gods.
But still, there must be something going on. There are countless stories throughout music history about moments when an artist has woken up from a dream with a song in their head or when, in a split second, a melody has appeared to them that would go on to be a totally timeless and globally beloved hit. It’s a tale told time and time again about how certain songs just seem to fall into an artist’s lap as if they’re dropped down from up above.
That’s how John Lennon felt when he came to make ‘Rain’. The song was made during the sessions for Revolver but was left off the tracklist; instead, it was only released as a B-side to ‘Paperback Writer’ as a standalone single. But regardless of it being axed, the creation of the song felt like a moment when Lennon was tapped on the shoulder by that creative higher power and handed an idea.
Lennon had been struggling with the track in the studio, unsure how to finish it off or make it all work. He had the lyrics and the melody, but he knew it needed something else and was left frustrated when he couldn’t find what that was. Deciding to abandon it for the day, he went home to blow off some steam with his favoured illicit substance of the time.
“I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana and, as I usually do, I listened to what I’d recorded that day,” he said of the evening. But in the haze of the haze, he made a fateful mistake; “Somehow I got it on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint. I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know… Listen to this!’ So I made them all play it backwards.”
That stoned mistake was exactly what he’d been looking for as the inspiration struck to reverse the outro of the song. But as the idea landed in his mind, Lennon couldn’t take credit for it, stating, “That one was the gift of God, of Ja, actually, the god of marijuana, right? So Ja gave me that one”.
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