The Meaning Behind "Grow Old with Me" by John Lennon and the Songwriting Challenge ...
It’s hard to talk too much about John Lennon‘s “Grow Old with Me” without referencing the tragedy that rendered the song’s heartfelt wishes an impossibility for Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono. Let’s instead celebrate it as a beautiful message of enduring affection that can be appreciated by lovers of all ages who want to stick with their significant others into the autumn and even winter years.
What is “Grow Old with Me” about? How did a songwriting challenge between John and Yoko help to create it? And how did the song eventually undergo a few Beatles-adjacent releases? The story begins with the flurry of songwriting and recording activity that John Lennon perpetrated in the final year of his life.
Yoko Throws Down the Gauntlet
Yoko Ono indirectly started the process of “Grow Old with Me” coming into existence with a song of her own. Ono had used Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43)” as the basis for her song “Let Me Count the Ways,” and she challenged Lennon to write one of his own based on a Robert Browning poem. On holiday in Jamaica in the summer of 1980, he obliged, using the poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra” as his jumping-off point, even borrowing the lines “Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be.”
Lennon made a demo recording of the song in the month before his death. It was a time when the couple was furiously recording material for both the comeback album Double Fantasy and the planned followup Milk and Honey. Ono explained why they held “Grow Old with Me” off the first album in the Milk and Honey liner notes:
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
