How John Lennon Turned His Frustration Into a Cosmic Beatles Song

“Across The Universe” finds John Lennon in a meditative state. Recording for the iconic Beatles song began in 1968, with a final mix completed in 1970. And the process of capturing multiple takes, with overdubs and studio effects, required another kind of patience.

However, Lennon was short on patience when he wrote the song. Echoing The Beatles’ interest in Eastern philosophy, he underwent an emotional transformation when an idea compelled him to leave his bed and begin writing “Across The Universe”.

The Beatles, too, were running out of patience with one another as they worked to complete their final album, which features Lennon’s celestial hymn.

Love and Marriage and Then Enlightenment

This psychedelic lullaby was born out of frustration.

Lennon told David Sheff, “I was lying next to my first wife [Cynthia Powell] in bed, you know, and I was irritated. She must have been going on and on about something and she’d gone to sleep and I’d kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream.”

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe.
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind,
Possessing and caressing me.

But instead of writing a bitter tune, Lennon transformed his frustration into what he called a “cosmic song.” The words came to him in the middle of the night, working through him without any clear meaning or direction. He said writing it while half-asleep felt like being possessed.

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the universe.
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox,
They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe.

Perhaps the smallness of a domestic spat was absorbed under the larger poetry of space and time. Fittingly, it appears on The Beatles’ final studio album, Let It Be. The band broke up in 1970, and they each had to let go to move forward. It seems Lennon did the same in writing “Across The Universe”.

Nothing’s gonna change my world.

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