True love can and often does manifest in strange, mysterious ways—like the time John Lennon wrote a particularly pining Beatles song that he would later come to realize was about Yoko Ono. At the time he wrote the song, he had yet to meet Ono at her avant-garde art exhibition at the Indica Gallery in London. That wouldn’t happen until early November 1966, almost one year to the date that Lennon and the rest of the band recorded the song that they would feature on Rubber Soul.
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As Lennon explained in Anthology, he wrote the Rubber Soul track, “Girl”, with no particular girl in mind. “There is no such thing as the girl,” he clarified. “She was a dream. But the words are all right. It wasn’t just a song. And it was about that girl. That turned out to be Yoko, in the end. The one that a lot of us were looking for.”
From the intimate performance that captured every breath Lennon took before a vocal phrase to the dreamy instrumental arrangement, he certainly captured what it was like to wistfully imagine the partner of your dreams who has planted themselves firmly in your mind’s eye. “Is there anybody going to listen to my story all about the girl who came to stay? / She’s the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry / Still, you don’t regret a single day.”
Christianity and the Beach Boys Played a Part in the Making of “Girl”
John Lennon called on many sources of inspiration for his 1965 Beatles track, “Girl”. One, of course, was the imaginary and elusive woman he was pining after—the woman who would later reveal herself to be John Lennon’s second wife, Yoko Ono. But the other was a far less romantic critique of Christianity as a whole. Elaborating further on the song in Anthology, Lennon said, “It’s about, ‘Was she taught when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure? Did she understand it?’ SI was trying to say something or other about Christianity, which I was opposed to at the time because I was brought up in the Church.”
Paul McCartney later revealed that the band also turned to The Beach Boys for inspiration as they fleshed out the rest of the track for inclusion on Rubber Soul. “The Beach Boys had a song where they’d done, ‘la, la, la, la,’ and we loved the innocence of that and wanted to copy it but not use the same phrase. So, we were looking around for another phrase, so it was, ‘dit, dit, dit, dit,’ which we decided to change in our waggishness to ‘tit, tit, tit, tit,’ which is virtually indistinguishable.”
In the end, this myriad of influences—some real, some not—turned into one of the Beatles songs of which Lennon was most proud. He once said, “This was about a dream girl. When Paul and I wrote lyrics in the old days, we used to laugh about it, like the Tin Pan Alley people would. And it was only later on that we tried to match the lyrics to the tune. I like this one. It was one of my best.”
Photo by: Universal Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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