The best artists and songwriters can transcend their public image with their music, letting us know their true inner workings beyond the fame and fortune. John Lennon was one of the first songwriters to reveal his true feelings in that way.
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On the 1964 Beatles song “I’m a Loser,” Lennon told his listeners of his insecurity and lack of self-esteem. Listening to it, it’s understandable if you forget for a few minutes that you’re being addressed by a guy who was one of the most famous human beings in the world at the time.
Sale Singing
Beatles for Sale is an album that doesn’t get its fair share of praise, at least when compared to the rest of The Beatles’ catalog. The timing of it, right between two highly hyped movie albums (A Hard Day’s Night and Help!) might have something to do with its relative anonymity. The fact there were no singles released from it also kept it somewhat in the background for years.
Listening to it now, you can hear how John Lennon and Paul McCartney were branching out a bit, both in terms of their stylistic choices and the topics about which they were writing. They were starting to write in a more confessional manner, instead of simply sticking to the familiar pop-song approach.
The influence of Bob Dylan had a lot to do with that in Lennon’s case, as he admitted in several interviews “I’m a Loser” was spurred on by hearing Dylan’s work. But Lennon was also subtly disclosing his inner pain and torment in songs like this, so subtly that even his bandmates didn’t notice at the time, as Paul McCartney explained in an interview with author Barry Miles:
“Looking back on it I think songs like ‘I’m A Loser’ and ‘Nowhere Man’ were John’s cries for help. We used to listen to quite a lot of country and western songs and they are all about sadness and ‘I lost my truck’ so it was quite acceptable to sing ‘I’m a loser.’ You didn’t really think about it at the time, it’s only later you think, God! I think it was pretty brave of John.”
Examining the Lyrics of “I’m a Loser”
“I’m a Loser” represented somewhat of a musical departure for The Beatles as well, as it saw them convincingly combing folk and country music in their approach. But Lennon’s lyrics are the most striking part of the song, in that they go much deeper into his psyche than pretty much anything he’d written to that point.
The Beatles often started songs with the refrain to immediately grab listeners. In this case, starting with the song with the lines I’m a loser / I’m a loser / And I’m not what I appear to be magnifies that effect. Suddenly, listeners are confronted by emotions that weren’t often expressed, not just by this band in particular, but by pop stars of all stripes.
In the first verse, Lennon eases us into the scenario by making it sound like a typical love-gone-wrong lament: She was a girl in a million, my friend / I should have known she would win in the end. But as the song progresses, the girl kind of fades to the background, replaced by first-person confessions of pain: Beneath this mask I am wearing a frown.
It gets to the point where the narrator starts to question if his loneliness is caused by her absence, or if perhaps there’s something deeper-seated at work: Is it for her or myself that I cry? When he reaches out to his audience in the final lines, he sounds like a defeated man hoping others won’t have to suffer in the same way: I’m telling you so that you won’t lose all.
Although McCartney’s harmonies keep coming around to give him company, Lennon’s vocal effort unveils his torment in understated fashion. The sheen The Beatles tended to imbue on all their songs helps to make “I’m a Loser” glide by in somewhat harmless fashion. Focus on those lyrics, however, and you hear John Lennon giving us a preview of the more harrowing confessional material he’d be delivering with regularity a few years down the road.
Photo by G Greenwell and A MacDonald /Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
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