One of John Lennon’s best songs for The Beatles took him months to complete: “The same old bits every few weeks”

It’s easy to hope for your favourite musicians to be struck by creative lightning and suddenly deliver a masterpiece in music. It’s the stuff of legend, but legends appeal to the masses, and most listeners would rather a performer be inhabited by a higher power only to deliver a savant-like sonic structure in the space of minutes. However, this is rarely the case and even geniuses like John Lennon can take months to deliberate over their work.

Perfection takes a long time to achieve. Sure, the ideal scenario is the explosion of talent spattered straight onto tape and into the airwaves, but even if a song is conceived quickly, it might take a little while to record. Lennon suffered a similar fate when he wrote arguably his finest song for The Beatles, ‘Across The Universe’.

“One of my best songs,” said Lennon of the Let It Be track, ‘Across The Universe’, and it has been routinely thought of as such ever since. It might seem like hubris, but Lennon was notoriously tough on his own work, so for him to stop and celebrate the song as one of his better compositions suggests he was truly impressed with what the tune became.

In one of those crystalline creative moments, the song seemingly came out of nowhere for Lennon after an argument with his first wife Cynthia, “I kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream. I went downstairs, and it turned into sort of a cosmic song rather than an irritated song… it drove me out of bed. I didn’t want to write it, but I was slightly irritable, and I went downstairs, and I couldn’t get to sleep until I’d put it on paper.”

Despite the seemingly prickly beginnings, the track has taken on a new persona with revision and is now seen as a resplendent moment on the record, a moment where it’s easy to let the music flow through you, to sit back and simply enjoy. For Lennon, the composition was very similar, “It’s like being possessed,” he said of writing the song, “like a psychic or a medium. The thing has to go down. It won’t let you sleep, so you have to get up, make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. That’s always in the middle of the night when you’re half-awake or tired, and your critical faculties are switched off.”

However, this seems to be only part of the story. The songwriter may have composed the scraps of the track in an instant, but it took weeks to complete in its entirety. Hunter Davies, the group’s authorised biographer, said that the tune was actually much more of a struggle than had first been popularised by Lennon’s comments with David Sheff.

“At his home, and in his head, he had so many half songs, uncompleted bits of verse, which he would play with, before quickly tiring of them,” Davies wrote in The Beatles, accurately capturing the zest and zeal of a restless creative. “For months, I seem to remember he was mucking around with ‘Across the Universe’, or variations on it. He would play or sing me the same old bits every few weeks, having failed to make any progress with it since I’d last seen him.”

Thankfully, Lennon, along with George Martin and the rest of The Beatles, would manage to capture the track on tape. It would become an integral bit of The Beatles’ final record and, perhaps most importantly, sum up the creative genius of John Lennon. Not only was he capable of instantaneous brilliance, but he was also an artisanal craftsman.