John Lennon Spent Months Struggling Over a Classic Beatles Song

John Lennon wrote the most songs out of all The Beatles, but his creative process took time. By the latter half of the 1960s, Paul McCartney began to churn out songs at a greater pace. Lennon still wrote many hits, but it took him a great deal of effort to get through them. Hunter Davies, who wrote the only authorized biography of the band, recalled Lennon spending months toiling over one song and never seeming to make any progress.

John Lennon spent months struggling over a Beatles song

Lennon first began working on the song “Across the Universe” while lying in bed with his first wife, Cynthia. 

“I was lying next to my first wife in bed, you know, and I was irritated, and I was thinking,” he said in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “She must have been going on and on about something and she’d gone to sleep and I kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream. I went downstairs and it turned into a sort of cosmic song rather than an irritated song, rather than a ‘Why are you always mouthing off at me?’”

He said he felt an explosion of dam burst that night, but it turned to a trickle as he tried to write the song. Davies recalled him spending months on the song and never seeming to go anywhere with it. 

“At his home, and in his head, he had so many half songs, uncompleted bits of verse, which he would play with, before quickly tiring of them,” Davies wrote in The Beatles. “For months I seem to remember he was mucking around with ‘Across the Universe’, or variations on it. He would play or sing me the same old bits every few weeks, having failed to make any progress with it since I’d last seen him.”

Luckily, Lennon didn’t abandon the song in its nascency. He considered it to be one of his best, so the long writing process was worth it.