4 Awesome Beatles Songs Where the Title Isn’t Featured in the Lyrics

The Beatles started a ton of trends that soon became par for the course among their rock peers. One of them was the practice of giving a song a title that wasn’t actually a part of the refrain or even mentioned in the song.

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A few of these tracks stand among the most beloved in their catalog. Here are four times the Fab Four threw us a titular curveball.

“Tomorrow Never Knows”

John Lennon’s personality was a fascinating jumble of contradictions. On the one hand, he insisted on boldly pushing his lyrics into uncharted territory. But he could be subconscious about such moves, worried about how people would receive them. “Tomorrow Never Knows” epitomizes this dichotomy. The lyrics detail Lennon’s fascination with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It gave 60s audiences new paths to perceiving the meaning of their existence. But Lennon, feeling wary of making too grand a statement, decided to use “Tomorrow Never Knows”, a saying of Ringo Starr’s, as the title, even though it had little to do with the lyrics.

“A Day In The Life”

By the time The Beatles came to the making of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they were trying something new practically every time they were in the studio. “A Day In The Life” took that boundary-pushing to the extreme. A hybrid of two separate Lennon-McCartney compositions that locked into place miraculously (with help from George Martin’s production genius, of course), the song doesn’t really have a refrain. As such, it was wide open for the group to use a title that summed up the feeling without referring directly to the lyrics. When rock fans now hear the words “A Day In The Life”, they’re likely to get chills just thinking about this song.

“The Inner Light”

While you might say the other Beatles just dipped their feet in the pool, George Harrison dove in headlong with the practice of adding Eastern music touches to his songs. For a catalog as well-known as that of the Fab Four, “The Inner Light” is somewhat unheralded. It first appeared as a B-side to “Lady Madonna” in 1968. That meant that many American fans couldn’t get their hands on a physical copy of it for decades if they didn’t buy the single. The song finds Harrison spouting philosophical musings on the power of the mind in between powerful Indian instrumental passages. The title might not appear in the lyrics, but they’re a wonderful approximation of the song’s message.

“Yer Blues”

The Beatles were all over the place on The White Album, both physically and stylistically. Occasionally, the three writers in the band worked separately from one another while creating tracks in different studios within Abbey Road. But on certain songs, such as “Yer Blues”, all four men assembled in the same room and blasted away with the type of reckless abandon that they hadn’t displayed in years. In amongst all the folky ramblings and psychedelic excursions, “Yer Blues” found John Lennon howling against a grinding musical backdrop. The purposeful misspelling in the title hints at the looseness of the entire enterprise. Meanwhile, the second-person perspective suggests that these blues can be understood and appreciated by anyone in the audience.

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