Off The Beatle Track

In My Life is a great song, written (mostly?) by John. I’ve been listening to it for 50 years, and it confuses me.

I doubt that The Beatles considered anyone poring over Rubber Soul’s lyrics 60 years after the album’s release. But here we are, and the optimistic among us expect that practice to consider long into the future.

“Lovers and friends“

John began writing In My Life as a recollection of places in Liverpool (including both Strawberry Field and Penny Lane), but he discarded his original lyrics because he found them boring. He then rewrote the lyrics to be less specific, mentioning in the first verse and the first bridge “places I’ll remember” and “lovers and friends,” some dead, some living, without naming names.

John was 24 when he wrote In My Life, but he’d already experienced the deaths of his Aunt Mimi’s husband, his Uncle George; his mother, Julia; and Stuart Sutcliffe, his friend and classmate and The Beatles’ bassist before Paul took up the instrument. Those deaths obviously weighed heavily on him.

Here’s the second verse:

But of all these friends and lovers,

There is no one compares with with you.

And these memories lose their meaning

When I think of love as something new.

I’m terrible at analyzing poetry, mostly because my first instinct it to try to make literal sense of it. When I approach this verse literally, I find three main points: (1) In My Life is sung to someone the singer loves who (2) supersedes all previous lovers and friends, even though (3) (and I feel much less confident about this point) the singer believes that thinking of love as a new phenomenon or feeling does a disservice to the memory of his earlier lovers and friends.

Does that sound right to you? If I’m right–and I can’t guarantee I am–maybe he’s afraid of the strong feelings associated with his new love, so he’s really talking to himself, and not the other person?

“I love you more”

The first word of the second bridge–Though–means something like however or nevertheless, setting up some kind of contrast between the introductory subordinate clause and the main cause (which begins I know I’ll often stop). But the two parts of the first sentence say essentially the same thing: he’ll continue to remember the places and people he mentioned at the beginning of the song.

Then the last line of the second bridge, which has nothing to do with the first three lines, calls back to the second line of the second verse, There is no one compares with you:

Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I’ll often stop and think about them.
In my life, I love you more.

I believe that John is surprised by the intensity of his feeling toward the unnamed you. And I hate to bring this up so late in the post, but to whom do we think John is singing? I’m not convinced, but it’s not a stretch to say that John’s relationship with his songwriting partner in 1965 was more intense than his relationship with Cynthia, his wife. (Does anyone else find it odd that John wrote so few songs apparently about Cyn?)

I hear In My Life as a love song belatedly grafted on to a song of reminiscence. After removing the “boring” parts of his original draft, it seems to me that John didn’t have enough material to finish a song about the friends, lovers, and places he remembered, so he added a few lines about his closest friend at the time. The Beatles were moving quickly in 1965, and, as I said at the top, no one expected In My Life to be the subject of twenty-first century scrutiny.

What’s your take on In My Life? email me at beatletrack@gmail.com.