(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 18 October 2025 15:42, UK
It might feel strange for a band to dislike their own songs, but when you think about it, of course, a quartet of creators wouldn’t equally like everything they made as a group. It won’t take fans of The Beatles long to find songs that John Lennon didn’t like.
As much as he may have written phenomenal pieces of work during his time in the Fab Four, Lennon was just as likely to go after one of his songs as he would praise them. Although Lennon remained proud of some of the band’s wilder moments, Paul McCartney wanted no part in one of the group’s final masterpieces.
Then again, McCartney was never one to put down any of his work, even if he thought it was subpar. Throughout most interviews, both then and now, Macca is more than happy to talk about the happy times that he experienced throughout his career, with the lesser moments merely being a footnote in what he was doing.
While making The White Album, McCartney had already become one of the dissenters to Lennon’s constant experimentation. Although McCartney was initially fond of experimentation on albums like Revolver, the cacophony in a song like ‘Revolution 9’ became too much for him.
Compared to the usual melodicism of Beatles recordings, Lennon’s experiment with Yoko Ono was disapproved by both McCartney and producer George Martin, who thought it shouldn’t have been included on the album. While the band braved the disagreements in the studio, the move to Twickenham Studios to record the beginnings proved disastrous yet again.
Yoko Ono and John Lennon. (Credit: Joost Evers / Anefo)
Despite the massive creative disagreements between McCartney and George Harrison, the band were still working on the beginnings of a new Lennon tune entitled ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. Only containing a few words, the track was considered at the time as a signal that Lennon’s time writing lyrics was coming to an end. It only contains around 13 different words, so it’s not wihtout merit, but Lennon refuted the claim: “A reviewer wrote of ‘She’s So Heavy’: ‘He seems to have lost his talent for lyrics, it’s so simple and boring.’ ‘She’s So Heavy’ was about Yoko. When it gets down to it, like she said, when you’re drowning you don’t say ‘I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,’ you just scream. And in ‘She’s So Heavy’ I just sang ‘I want you, I want you so bad, she’s so heavy, I want you,’ like that.”
The finished version of the song on Abbey Road would become The Beatles’ most significant foray into the world of heavy music, featuring a massive fadeout ending with an abrupt cut before flipping the album to the jaunty ‘Here Comes the Sun’.
While the central riff is already harsh, Harrison suggested adding white noise to the final track. Featuring various swooshes of noise, the song’s final seconds see the synthesised sounds almost overtaking the central riff, which reportedly didn’t sit well with McCartney.
According to longtime Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, McCartney was less than thrilled to see the song being given its fuzzy treatment in the studio. As Lennon egged Emerick on to increase the volume of the white noise, he recounted, “Over my shoulder, I saw a dejected Paul sitting slumped over, head down, staring at the floor. He didn’t say a word, but his body language made it clear that he was very unhappy…To Paul, it must have been like ‘Revolution 9’ all over again. John was deliberately distorting the Beatles music, trying to turn the group into an avant-garde ensemble instead of a pop band”.
Regardless of Lennon’s insistence that the white noise remains, this song would mark one of the final times that all four Beatles were in the studio together, with the rest of them going their separate ways and only reuniting when needing to record a handful of touchups to the shelved Let It Be project.
At once the rawest and most experimental song on the album, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, adds some necessary tension and grit to an album that is otherwise pristine. It’s a slap in the face, whereas the rest of the album is a warm hug. It’s a necessary jolt just as you’re getting lulled to sleep. It’s a wild experience that reaches a frightening apex before coming to a sudden end that leaves you feeling cold and uncertain. That’s all to say that it’s a near-perfect composition.
Even though ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ brings the band’s end to a dramatic finish, one that might have felt like a triumphant finale, it was never more evident that the band members had slowly drifted apart.
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