In the mood to have your mind blown by some lyrics you might have missed the first few times you listened to a song? The following tunes from 1968 might just hide some secretly mind-blowing lyrics. I certainly missed them the first time I heard them. Let’s take a look!
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“Glass Onion” by The Beatles
“The walrus was Paul.”
Many Beatles tracks have been the subject of overanalysis, with either Paul McCartney or John Lennon eventually admitting that certain picked-apart lyrics were actually nonsense. When it comes to the 1968 song “Glass Onion”, though, fans still pick apart the cryptic lyrics to find some meaning buried within. And what’s truly mind-blowing about this song is that it’s self-aware. Lennon wrote this song as a sort of joke, poking fun at the people he knew would analyze the lyrics to death as they had done with previous Beatles tunes.
“Glass Onion” is kind of meaningless, and that’s the point. Though, some lyrics probably still hold some kind of hidden meaning. We’ll probably never know for sure, though.
“Care Of Cell 44” by The Zombies
“And we’ll get to know each other for a second time / And then you can tell me ’bout your prison stay.”
This psychedelic pop song came out in late 1967 but became popular in 1968, so I’ll go ahead and include it on this list. I have to admit, when I first heard this song, I thought it was just your typical run-of-the-mill love tune. I didn’t listen super closely to the lyrics. Given that “Care Of Cell 44” by The Zombies was released in 1967 during the Vietnam War, I thought the more forelorn lyrics were written from the perspective of a woman waiting for her love to come back from the war. Clearly, I missed the word “prison” at the start of the song.
This song is about someone waiting for their lover to be released from jail, where they might be serving time for harming the narrator in some way.
“America” by Simon & Garfunkel
“‘Kathy, I’m lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping / ‘I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why’ / Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike / They’ve all come to look for America.”
I should have known better when it comes to this entry on our list of songs with mind-blowing lyrics from 1968. Paul Simon is a next-level songwriter, after all. It only makes sense that “America” was about so much more than people searching for the American dream. Most of the song follows an optimistic pair in love, on a quest to find their purpose in America.
However, when you read closely, this song is really about looking for belonging and purpose in the chaos of the 1960s with little success. Our narrator probably won’t find comfort through hitchhiking and traveling, and neither will anyone else trying to navigate a world full of equal parts despair and hope.
Photo by Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
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