The best creative inspiration often comes from observing the world around us, and these Beatles songs about real-life events are certainly no exception. And indeed, the Fab Four had plenty going on in their respective realities, personally and globally, from which they could draw inspiration for lyrics, song titles, and more. From the changes happening in their own lives to the tumultuous air of change that permeated the 1960s, the Beatles took these events and transformed them into great music.
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Here’s some of the best.
“Hey Jude”
For most of the Beatles’ tenure, John Lennon was with his first wife, Cynthia Lennon, with whom he had his first son, Julian. By the late 1960s, John divorced Cynthia, married Yoko Ono in March 1969, and had his second son, Sean. Paul McCartney, who had been like an uncle to Julian, wrote “Hey Jude” while driving to visit Julian and Cynthia.
“I thought, as a friend of the family, I would motor out to Weybridge. Tell them that everything was all right,” McCartney recalled in Anthology. “To try and cheer them up, basically, and see how they were. I would always turn the radio off and try and make up songs, just in case. I started singing: ‘Hey Jules, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better.’ It was optimistic, a hopeful message for Julian. ‘Come on, man, your parents got divorced. I know you’re not happy, but you’ll be okay.’”
“A Day in the Life”
“A Day in the Life” is the sprawling closer to the Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. One of many Beatles songs John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote together, the first verses come directly from real-life events in a newspaper Lennon was reading while he sat at the piano (with a few creative liberties here and there, of course).
“Just as it sounds,” Lennon said in an interview with David Sheff. “I was reading the paper one day and noticed two stories. One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire. Paul’s contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song, ‘I’d love to turn you on,’ that he’d had floating around in his head and couldn’t use. I thought it was a damn good piece of work.”
“Two Of Us”
One could easily consider the opening track of the Beatles’ final record, Let It Be, to be a song about Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s long-time friendship slowly coming to a close as the band drew nearer to their final split. In reality, the song was about Paul’s relationship with his wife, Linda McCartney. He wrote the song while out on one of their many leisurely drives together, where they would purposefully try to get lost.
“One of the great things about Linda was that while I was driving and going, ‘Oh my God, I think I’m lost,’ she’d simply say, ‘Great!’ She loved getting lost.. One day, we went out into the countryside and found a little wood that looked as if it might be a good place for a walk. I parked the car. There’s a photograph of me in the Aston Martin, sitting with the driver’s door open and my feet out. I’ve got my guitar. That’s me writing “Two of Us,”” the former Beatle explained in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.
“In My Life”
Each Beatle certainly had a distinct writing style, and for John Lennon, that meant writing Beatles songs that were less about real-life events and more about avant-garde abstractions and musings. However, a journalist pointing this out to Lennon would eventually inspire the musician to start writing more literally, which is how “In My Life” came about in 1965. The Beatles tucked the retrospective song in the middle of the B-side to Rubber Soul.
“I had a complete set of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic vision of a trip from home to downtown on a bus naming every sight,” Lennon later explained. “It became “In My Life,” which is a remembrance of friends and lovers of the past. It was, I think, my first real major piece of work. Up til then, it had all been sort of glib and throwaway. And that was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric. Inspired by Kenneth Allsop, the British journalist, and Bob Dylan.”
Photo by John Downing/Getty Images
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