In total, John Lennon wrote 95 songs for the Beatles. But that’s only the officially released effort. It’s estimated that the band’s archive is hundreds of songs deep as John Lennon and Paul McCartney proved to be prolific from the moment their friendship and creative partnership began. With the sheer amount of material, it would surely be impossible to pick a favourite track or compare their artistic value, but there was one cut that always stood out to Lennon.
You might assume it would be a major hit as Lennon wrote plenty of number-one tracks for the band, including timeless classics like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. Or perhaps it would be one of the weirder, deeper cuts. Later in The Beatles’ history, Lennon’s pen became increasingly imaginative, casting off literal or relatable sentiments for winding symbolism that would then carry into his solo career. You might think he’d pick out ‘Dear Prudence’ or ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ or any other late-stage opus as his finest work.
But in reality, his favourite was a relatively simple song, offering up that simplicity as exactly the reason he loves it. Even in interviews long after the song was released and the band had moved on to different things, Lennon still shared his love for ‘Girl’, a track from their 1965 album Rubber Soul.
While there’s always a lot of talk about the tracks that marked clear changes in the group, Lennon argued that this is one of them. “When Paul and I wrote lyrics in the old days we used to laugh about it like the Tin Pan Alley people would,” he said, “And it was only later on that we tried to match the lyrics to the tune.”
On ‘Girl’, those two threads are tied tight in a beautiful bow. The classical love lyricism is matched with a slow, seductive instrumental. Akin to ‘Michelle’, which sits on the same album, both songs see the band borrow from more classical guitar styles rather than the typical rock and roll sound they’d always had and already mastered. This time round, on ‘Girl’ they afforded the romantic lyrics a romantic sound.
It marks a moment where the band were ready to look outward into different and bigger things. Really, Rubber Soul sits as the bridge between the foundational rock-and-roll Beatles and their movement into being something beyond that. As they first met Bob Dylan and started being opened up to different genres and styles, they were pushing themselves to go beyond their typical writing habits.
In the case of ‘Girl’, the inspiration was taken from a holiday which proved productive. Before making the album, Paul McCartney had been to Greece and brought the sound home as a souvenir. He said, “There’s a Zorba-like thing at the end that I wrote which came from that holiday. I was very impressed with another culture’s approach because it was slightly different from what we did. We just did it on acoustic guitars instead of bouzoukis.”
As they pushed into the more adventurous territory, beyond their Liverpudlian skiffle origins and their love for American rock and roll, ‘Girl’ saw them casting a global net to find exactly the right sound for their romantic opus for an unknown dream girl.
In the end, that girl revealed herself. Lennon’s love for the song was only boosted when he later felt it to be prophetic. “‘Girl’ is real,” he said. “There is no such thing as the girl; she was a dream, but the words are all right. It wasn’t just a song, and it was about that girl – that turned out to be Yoko, in the end – the one that a lot of us were looking for.”
The song stuck in his head as a clear victory as Lennon declared, “I like this one. It was one of my best.”