Oh, to be in a relationship with a songwriter. Can you imagine? One day, you are having sonnets written about you, detailing the curves of your face, habits you didn’t realise you had and an undying love for you put into wonderful melody. The next, you can’t even have a small argument with your partner without them heading downstairs and calling you names over a major scale. For Cynthia Lennon, she didn’t have to imagine, as she was married to John Lennon, who was drawn to guitar and piano the moment they had a slight disagreement.

“I was lying next to me first wife in bed, and I was irritated,” said Lennon when discussing how he ended up writing ‘Across The Universe’. “She must have been going on and on about something, and she’d gone to sleep, and 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.”

Unfortunately, we don’t know what Cynthia made of the song that detailed her “going on and on”. However, we do know that the one person Lennon had even more arguments with than his wife didn’t like it. The music critic and journalist Ian MacDonald notes in his book two Beatles songs that Paul McCartney was allegedly “sulky” when recording, the first of which was ‘Across The Universe’.

McCartney’s reasons for disliking the song remain unclear; however, it could well be that he was jealous of the track. This was written as the band was putting together their penultimate record, Let It Be. There was tension in the group, and creative differences were at an all-time high, so when Lennon came forward with such a great song, it may have been that McCartney couldn’t help but feel jealous.

Lennon was never shy about disclosing how much of a triumph he thought the track was. “It’s one of the best lyrics I’ve written. In fact, it could be the best,” he said. “It’s good poetry, or whatever you call it, without chewing it. See, the ones I like are the ones that stand as words without melody. They don’t have to have any melody, like a poem. You can read them.”

The other track that McCartney wasn’t happy recording was ‘Yer Blues’, which Lennon wrote as a parody of British blues music. Again, there are a number of reasons that McCartney might not have enjoyed recording this song. The first could be the setting, as they originally laid it down in Abbey Road Studio Two’s “annexe,” which McCartney has since referred to as “A cupboard.”

However, the main reason he was likely unhappy recording the song was that he didn’t want to make a parody. He asked Lennon to change the title from ‘Yer Blues’, telling him he should “just say it straight,” but Lennon refused, admitting that he liked blues music but had no intention of making a serious blues track.

“We were all listening to Sleepy John Estes and all that in art school, like everybody else,” Lennon concluded. “But to sing it was something else. I’m self-conscious about doing it.”