The Beatles Lyric That Reflected John Lennon's Distaste for the Humdrum Life
Songwriters often subconsciously reveal things that even they don’t realize. In some cases, it takes an outside source to put a finger on it, maybe somebody within your own band who knows you better than anybody else.
In the case of “Good Morning Good Morning,” John Lennon, the song’s chief writer for The Beatles, didn’t explain that it might have come from his own deep-seated frustrations with his daily life. But after the fact, his songwriting partner Paul McCartney made the connection.
“Morning” Has Broken
If you judge whether something is a concept album or not by interconnected songs or a running narrative, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band doesn’t really make the grade. The masterful 1967 album only really holds up in that regard for the first two and last two songs, when Sgt. Pepper’s band addresses the audience.
But the songs do share thematic connections. Many of them deal with the routine ephemera of everyday life, at least in lyrical terms. The music, so wondrous and inspired, then takes those slice-of-life stories and renders them all indelibly magical.
“Good Morning Good Morning” was inspired by the slogan in a cereal commercial. In interviews after the breakup of The Beatles, John Lennon dismissed his song as inessential. But Paul McCartney, as he explained to biographer Barry Miles, heard in its lyrics Lennon’s dissatisfaction with the tedium of his first marriage:
“John was feeling trapped in suburbia and was going through some problems with Cynthia. It was about his boring life at the time—there’s a reference in the lyrics to ‘nothing to do’ and ‘meet the wife’; there was an afternoon TV soap called Meet the Wife that John watched, he was that bored, but I think he was also starting to get alarm bells.”
Source: newsbreak.com/Jim Beviglia
