What do The Beatles mean by ‘Glass Onion’?

Not everything that John Lennon put into his songs for The Beatles was meant to make the most sense. It was hard enough trying to find out what some of his psychedelic songs were about in the early days, and it was bound to be tough trying to find some kind of internal meaning behind a tune like ‘I Am the Walrus’. But whereas those songs were the equivalent of musical tone painting, anyone who tries to decipher what every line in ‘Glass Onion’ is truly about is fighting a losing battle.

Lennon had already started to catch on to the fact that people were trying to read into things on every one of his records, so the next best thing for him to do was make something that deliberately messed them up. He already found it funny that people were trying to figure out if Paul McCartney was really killed in a car accident in 1966, so when he threw in lines about how Macca was the Walrus, it sent some theorists into overdrive trying to figure out what he really meant.

Then again, they’d also have that problem with every other line of the tune. Throughout each verse, Lennon is trying his best to throw in different extensions on the band’s older material. One minute he will be talking about going to a place even more trippy than Strawberry Fields, and the next he’ll be checking in on that lonesome guru from ‘The Fool on the Hill’. But beyond the song references, there are also various phrases that don’t have any clear origin.

We had already been made privy to newspaper taxis and cellophane flowers on ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’, but this was an entirely different version of that. Compared to what everyone was listening to while they were dropping acid, Lennon was capable of making equally strange things on his own, like trying to make a dovetail joint. But out of all the stranger references in the lyrics, th

So, what does ‘Glass Onion’ actually mean?

Because, on first glance, the origin of the phrase ‘glass onion’ may have been throwing the conspiracy theorists a bone. After all, they were concerned with the health and well-being of McCartney after he supposedly died, so the origin of a ‘glass onion’ being a transparent coffin that people could look into. Then again, that would have been far too morbid even by Lennon’s standards.

When he talks about looking into a ‘Glass Onion’, he’s not encouraging everyone to take a look at the dead.

Other times in the lyrics, he had talked about trying to see how the other half lives, so him talking about looking through this transparent glass may have been his way of inviting the rest of the audience to come down the musical rabbit hole with them for the rest of The White Album.

And it’s not like the rest of the album didn’t deliver on that supposed weirdness. ‘Back in the USSR’ and ‘Dear Prudence’ set everything up quite nicely, but after this song plays, all bets are off for where the album is going to go, whether that’s talking about an English fairground on ‘Helter Skelter’, slipping into the world of sound design on ‘Revolution 9’, or George Harrison coming through with some of his most heartbreaking material on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.

So when the song ends, that strange string section comes in, it’s almost as if the audience has finally been able to look through that glass onion and see the world as Lennon did. It was certainly strange, but since when has the word ‘strange’ ever been a bad thing when it comes to the Fab Four?