Why The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” Is So Psychedelic
YouTubeThe Strawberry Fields music video.
John Lennon called “Strawberry Fields Forever” “one of the few true songs I ever wrote.”
“Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Help!,” he said, were “ones I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it.”
On the surface, the song is about the garden of a Salvation Army house called “Strawberry Field,” near Lennon’s childhood home.
As Lennon’s aunt, Mimi Smith recalled: “There was something about the place that always fascinated John. He could see it from his window… He used to hear the Salvation Army band [playing at the garden party], and he would pull me along, saying, ‘Hurry up, Mimi – we’re going to be late.”
But the song also goes deeper than recounting a childhood memory. For Lennon, it was an attempt to convey a childhood feeling — one that had followed him into adulthood.
“The second line goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree,'” Lennon explained in 1980. “Well, what I was trying to say in that line is ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius.’
“It’s the same problem as I had when I was five: ‘There is something wrong with me because I seem to see things other people don’t see. Am I crazy, or am I a genius?’ What I’m saying, in my insecure way, is, ‘Nobody seems to understand where I’m coming from. I seem to see things in a different way from most people.'”
Lennon’s song — which Time magazine later called “the latest sample of The Beatles’ astonishing inventiveness” — prompted Paul McCartney to write a childhood ode of his own.
“[John would] write ‘Strawberry Fields,'” McCartney explained. “I’d go away and write ‘Penny Lane’ to compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition.”
That competition arguably defined The Beatles’ sounds. Just as Strawberry Fields Forever came to define John Lennon as an artist.
Today, it exists both as music and as a monument to Lennon’s life. In New York City’s Central Park, just a few minutes walk from where John Lennon was tragically gunned down in December 1980, Strawberry Fields acts as a living memorial to a musical genius.
Enjoy this look at the stories behind some of the best Beatles songs? Next, learn more about John Lennon’s dark side — and why Paul McCartney may have been the best Beatle of them all.
