But “Julia” is a “song of love,” and, regardless of where that love was directed precisely, nobody did those kinds of songs better than this man and this group. About two years later, with The Beatles in his rearview mirror, he recorded “Mother,” a harrowing excavation of his deep-seated feelings of abandonment concerning his parents. What you do hear is the combination of mantra-like calm and profound yearning he conjures each time he sings his mother’s name. Lennon’s contention that he intermingled the memories of his mother with his then-current emotions for his wife Yoko is hard to hear in the finished product. The bulk of the lyric consists of poetic imagery that speaks of beauty and distance: “Silent cloud” “Morning moon” “Her hair of floating sky.” He borrowed some of the lines from the poem “Sand And Foam” by Kahlil Gibran, including the opening couplet: “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you.” It must have been strange for fans to hear the leader of the biggest band in the world co-opting a line that evokes ineffectuality, but Lennon was always about upending expectations. There is an undeniable loneliness evident in his voice, even amidst the double-tracking that Lennon preferred. Using a finger-picking style he learned from Donovan while in India, Lennon plays delicate arpeggios around his fragile yet somehow soothing vocal melody. Lennon is the only Beatle to perform on the track, solo efforts having become commonplace within the Fab Four around this time. An inquest into the accident a month later recorded a verdict of misadventure. A post-mortem later revealed that she had died of massive brain injuries caused by skull fractures. We got our mantra, we sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food and writing all those songs. Julia, then 44, was hit head-on by Eric's Standard Vanguard car, thrown high in the air, and killed instantly on the night of July 15, 1958. And all the stuff on the White Album was written in India while we were supposedly giving money to Maharishi, which we never did. “But it was sort of a combination of Yoko and my mother blended into one. In his 1980 interview with Playboy magazine, Lennon explained that the trip to India provided ample opportunity for songwriting, and “Julia” was a byproduct of that. But by the time The White Album rolled around in 1968, all subjects were game, as Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote oodles of material (with George Harrison and, on one song, Ringo Starr also contributing), so much so that a double-album was deemed necessary to contain it all. The Beatles rarely referenced their personal lives, at least directly, in song in their early years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |