Songfacts®:

• Playing "mind games" with another person can be a pernicious undertaking, but that's not what John Lennon is singing about here. This song is inspired by a book he read called Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space. Written by Robert Masters and Jean Houston, it explains how we can improve ourselves on various levels by playing tricks on our minds; the song is really about making yourself a better person.
• This was the only single released from Lennon's 1973 Mind Games album, which was a modest success but nowhere near as popular as his Beatles output. This song has held up well, getting significant airplay on a variety of radio formats. In a 1998 interview with Uncut, Yoko Ono posited that the song may have been ahead of its time. "I think that people didn't quite get the message because this was again before its time," she said. "Now, people would understand it. I don't think in those days people knew that they were playing mind games anyway."
• This started off as a song called "Make Love Not War," which had a strong antiwar sentiment. Lennon eventually abandoned that theme and wrote an entirely different lyric to the melody.
• Just credited as "Jimmy" on the Mind Games' inner sleeve, Jimmy Iovine – future engineer, producer (Springsteen, Petty, U2), label boss (Interscope) and audio entrepreneur (Beats headphones) – was a junior tech at the Record Plant "moving microphones around and sweeping the floor." That according to Jim Keltner, who played drums on Mind Games, recalled in the box-set booklet.
  
  "I still remind him that he used to be little Jimmy. He was the first one to come up to me in the morning... my eyes were barely open. I'd hear this voice calling me: 'You want coffee? How 'bout cigarettes?' It's so amazing to think of what he went on to achieve."