3 Beatles Songs Written About Real Places
The Beatles often wrote songs about their personal experiences in their music. This included writing about real locations, such as places that impacted their lives while growing up in Liverpool. Several settings they wrote about are places that Beatles fans can still visit.
Here are 3 Beatles songs written about real locations
‘Penny Lane’
“Penny Lane” was released in 1967 as a double-A side single with “Strawberry Fields Forever”. The track was primarily written by Paul McCartney and is about a street in Liverpool called Penny Lane. The song is McCartney’s recollection of the street from his upbringing. In a 2009 interview with Clash, McCartney reflected on “Penny Lane”, saying it was a place he and John Lennon knew well.
‘“Penny Lane’ was kind of nostalgic, but it was really a place that John and I knew,” McCartney said. “It was actually a bus terminus. I’d get a bus to his house, and I’d have to change at Penny Lane or the same with him to me, so we often hung out at that terminus, like a roundabout. It was a place that we both knew, and so we both knew the things that turned up in the story.”
Penny Lane is still a lively street in Liverpool filled with restaurants and shops. Many Beatles fans trek out here to see the sights described in the song.
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’
“Strawberry Fields Forever” was primarily written by John Lennon. The song is about Lennon’s childhood experience playing in the garden at Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children’s home near Lennon’s in Liverpool. In the 1980 interview with David Sheff, Lennon called “Strawberry Fields Forever” one of the only “true songs” he ever wrote for The Beatles since it came from a personal experience.
In The Beatles by Hunter Davies, Lennon’s Aunt Mimi said Lennon was fascinated by Strawberry Field and “As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, ‘Mimi, come on. We’re going to be late.’ Today, Strawberry Field has become an exhibit dedicated to Lennon, where visitors can see the piano he used to write “Imagine.”
‘Blue Jay Way’
“Blue Jay Way” is a song George Harrison wrote for The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack. The title refers to a street in Los Angeles where Harrison stayed on a visit to the Hollywood Hills before traveling to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He wrote the track while jet-lagged, waiting for The Beatles’ former publicist Derek Taylor.
“I felt really knackered with the flight, but I didn’t want to go to sleep until he came,” Harrison later shared. “There was a fog and it got later and later. To keep myself awake, just as a joke to pass the time while I waited, I wrote a song about waiting for him in Blue Jay Way. There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this house which I hadn’t noticed until then… so I messed around on it, and the song came.”
It’s unclear which house he stayed in, but the street has become a mini landmark for Beatles fans.
