The Beatles sang a lot of songs about love and delivered many songs with the word “you” in the title in their early days. But as the 60s progressed, they started to branch out with their lyrics to keep in line with the psychedelic times.
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These four songs defy easy description if you just focus on the narrative. But they nonetheless show off the ambition and ingenuity of The Beatles’ songwriters.
“I Am The Walrus”
John Lennon was starting to get fed up with people analyzing his song lyrics looking for deeper meanings between the lines. He decided to purposely send them way off out into the woods with a song that was mostly nonsensical. And yet, what brilliant nonsense “I Am The Walrus” turned out to be. Lennon raised the stakes on Dylanesque stream-of-consciousness writing, adding his love of Lewis Carroll’s wordplay and absurdist humor to a thesaurus-straining choice of words. Throw in a little bit of hippie-ish sentiment: “I am he as you are he as you are me/And we are all together.” Stir it all up and you end up with a surreal masterpiece where the wildness of the music is more than matched by the daring of the words.
“Glass Onion”
Lennon was at it again on “Glass Onion”, one of the unassailable standouts from The White Album. Only here, he gets a little “meta” before such a tactic even had a name. During the lyrics, he references no less than five different Beatles songs. Only he twists most of them ever so slightly. For instance, he sings of “Fixing a hole in the ocean.” Most tellingly, he goes back to “I Am The Walrus”, undercutting his original stance in the process: “Well, here’s another clue for you all/The Walrus was Paul.” Those lines would send conspiracy theorists down all kinds of wild rabbit holes. Even the song’s title contains meaning within meaning. It references an obscure flower-like creation that, when you look through it, skews perspective.
“The Inner Light”
George Harrison brought Eastern philosophy into The Beatles’ sphere. And because of the influence of the Fab Four, he essentially helped broadcast those beliefs to younger members of the group’s audience who might not have otherwise known about them. “The Inner Light”, released as a B-side in 1968, asks people to question how they might have previously viewed the world. It suggests that we have the power to travel long distances and overcome earthly obstacles simply by using our minds. And it also implies that the secret to making those leaps is to accept that we’re all somewhat ignorant. Accompanied by a dreamy melody and hypnotic Indian instrumentation, it’s one of Harrison’s most subtly moving compositions.
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”
This song gets a bad rap in large part because of how the other members of The Beatles aside from its composer (Paul McCartney) hated the recording sessions for it. McCartney endlessly put the other three through their paces in an effort to get just the right musical feel for the song. But when you look past that, you get McCartney at his most lyrically playful. That he does all this in the service of a song about a mass murderer only adds to the chaos. Yet even as go he goes on about “pataphysical science” and “painting testimonial pictures”, McCartney makes sure that every syllable slides neatly into the meter. That makes “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” as catchy as it is trippy.
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