The John Lennon Beatles Song Where He Hid Subliminal Messages About His Marriage
John Lennon’s first marriage to Cynthia Lennon lasted from 1962 to 1968. It ended quickly after she caught him cheating on her with his next wife, Yoko Ono. Even before that, their marriage still had problems, and one Beatles song written by John Lennon featured subliminal messages that their marriage was in trouble.
The Beatles’ ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ was written about John Lennon’s marriage
“Good Morning, Good Morning” debuted on 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. While the album featured The Beatles being more experimental and surreal, John Lennon’s personal life still found life within his lyrics. Lennon got divorced one year after this song debuted, and his marital troubles were infused with his music.
In Barry Miles’ biography Many Years From Now, Paul McCartney said Lennon felt “trapped” in his relationship with Cynthia. He was bored with his life and found inspiration from a soap opera he watched called Meet the Wife.
“This is largely John’s song,” McCartney shared. “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 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 and so ‘Good morning, good morning.’”
John Lennon included the sounds of animals escaping in the song
“Good Morning, Good Morning” is about being stuck in a rut. Nothing is changing, and life is just blissful boredom. This was John Lennon’s way of expressing his boredom with his marriage, but he included something else in The Beatles’ song that embodied his desire to escape.
According to Express, Lennon told Beatles’ studio engineer Geoff Emerick to include the sounds of animals escaping throughout the track. Some of the sounds fans can hear are dogs barking, cats meowing, horses neighing, and a fox being chased by hunters.
“John said to me during one of the breaks that he wanted to have the sound of animals escaping,” Emerick explained. “And that each successive animal should be capable of frightening or devouring its predecessor! So those are not just random effects, there was actually a lot of thought put into all that.”
Lennon called the song a ‘throwaway’ years later
“Good Morning, Good Morning” wasn’t released as a single, so it never charted. However, it’s not a song Lennon was proud of years later. He wasn’t fond of many of the songs he wrote for The Beatles, and he shared these opinions years after the band ended. He named a few of these songs “throwaways,” and “Good Morning, Good Morning” was one of them.
‘Good Morning’ is mine,” Lennon told David Sheff in a 1980 Playboy interview. “It’s a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought. The ‘Good morning, good morning’ was from a Kellogg’s cereal commercial. I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing, and it came over, and then I wrote the song.
