The Beatles have hidden secret messages in many of their songs. And no, we’re not talking about backward odes to satan or confessions of replacing members with clones. We’re talking about hidden inspirations that the group weaved into their songwriting for fans to dissect later on. Find three such songs, below.
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1. “Got to Get You into My Life”
On the surface, “Got to Get You into My Life” reads like yet another gushing love song from the Fab Four. However, according to Paul McCartney, the lyrics are about love, just not the kind we’re used to.
Anyone who has listened to the latter half of the Beatles’ discography will know their love of hallucinogens and marijuana well. The warbly sound effects and off-kilter lyricism of their final years as a band all lead to one conclusion: they were no strangers to being under the influence. This song is their ode to that journey.
“What we had to get into our lives, it seemed, was marijuana,” McCartney wrote in his book, The Lyrics 1956 to the Present. “Until we happened upon marijuana, we’d been drinking men. We were introduced to grass when we were in the U.S., and it blew our tiny little minds.”
2. “Blackbird”
The meaning behind “Blackbird” may not be all that hidden to staunch Beatles fans–especially with the song’s new exposure courtesy of Beyoncé. But, if you’ve never paid much mind to the words McCartney was singing here’s the explanation.
McCartney was deeply moved by the Little Rock Nine, the brave Black students that stood in face of racism by attending a formerly all-white school in Arkansas. He was so moved, in fact, that he penned this track.
“I was sitting around with my acoustic guitar and I’d heard about the civil rights troubles that were happening in the ’60s in Alabama, Mississippi, Little Rock in particular,” McCartney once said. “I just thought it would be really good if I could write something that if it ever reached any of the people going through those problems, it might give them a little bit of hope. So, I wrote ‘Blackbird.'”
3. “She Said, She Said”
Actor Peter Fonda is the unsuspecting onus behind “She Said, She Said.” The line She said / I know what it’s like to be dead was inspired by something Fonda, whom found himself in a near-death experience when he was a young boy, said to John Lennon.
The story of Fonda’s brush with death was relayed to Lennon while on acid. The convergence of those two things forced Lennon’s pen.
(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
And then there’s the schoolboy humor in Penny Lane. Paul has mentioned lines like “it’s a clean machine” and “finger pies”.