John Lennon’s Science of Songwriting

What compels creativity at the level of John Lennon’s songwriting is difficult to pin down, but sifting through various pearls of wisdom illuminates the mystery.

How did John Lennon write so many excellent songs? The conventional wisdom credits the Beatles’ performances in Hamburg, Germany, where the band played in strip clubs. Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell, who first made his reputation by debunking what he called “the talent myth”, claimed that it wasn’t innate ability that made the Beatles great, but those long nights in Hamburg, where they played for six and even eight hours at a stretch.

The key to excelling at anything, argued Gladwell, is “to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” 

Gladwell didn’t come up with this number himself, but the idea that 10,000 hours will make anyone a John Lennon-level songwriter or a Bill Gates-level entrepreneur has now become enshrined in business school case studies, locker room pep talks, and general lore. My dentist told me a version of the Hamburg story while he was putting in my first crown. I couldn’t talk back – which was frustrating because, by that time, I knew it was wrong.

The Beatles didn’t log 10,000 hours on stage: not even close; and even if they had, they didn’t all become great songwriters (or even, in one case, good musicians). There had to be another explanation.

How many hours did the Beatles actually play during those formative years? Malcolm Gladwell counts 270 performances in Hamburg. If they performed eight hours a night, as John Lennon claimed, that makes 2,160 hours. Gladwell estimates that the band also performed about 930 times in England, Scotland, and Sweden. Those performances, however, rarely lasted longer than one hour. (Their later performances were even shorter, just 30 minutes.)

At a maximum, then, the Beatles played live for about 3,000 hours, not 10,000. Of course, they also practiced off-stage, but the number of hours they practiced can only be guessed.

The Beatles’ live performances don’t count as practice, according to Anders Ericsson, the Swedish psychologist who first proposed the 10,0000-hour rule and whose research Gladwell popularized. Ericsson insisted: the hours spent performing or playing music for pleasure do not count toward the magic number. The hours that tell are what Ericsson called “deliberate practice”: meticulous, self-critical, focused on a single task or skill (1993).

This explains why the Beatles’ first bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, never got any good at playing his instrument. He never practiced. The Beatles kept him on because he was Lennon’s closest friend, and he looked cool on stage. Despite spending many hours playing with the Beatles in Hamburg, he never advanced as a musician. 

In contrast, George Harrison took his instrument seriously and eventually became an accomplished guitarist. What he never became was a great songwriter. He did write some good songs, including “Something”, “Here Comes the Sun”, and “My Sweet Lord”. His output of first-class tunes, though, was never more than a trickle, compared with John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s decade-long geyser. Yet Harrison played the same number of hours, on the same Hamburg stages, as the other two. 

Hours of playing, then, do not account for an artistic phenomenon like John Lennon. What other explanation is there?

In his teens, Dean Keith Simonton wanted to be a rock guitarist like Jimi Hendrix. Instead, he went to graduate school at Harvard and became the world’s foremost authority on creativity. No one has crunched more data, collated more case studies, or authored more publications on creativity and genius.

Simonton believes that the best explanation of creativity is BVSR, blind variation and selective retention, a model that was proposed in 1960 by psychologist Donald Campbell. In this model, which Simonton has refined into a mathematical theory, songwriting creativity has two stages. First, you blindly generate combinations of tones, colors, shapes, and ideas. Then you select the best combinations and work them up into finished pieces.

The BVSR model is based on Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Just as blind chance generated the different species that live on our planet, so has blind variation generated the different styles of art, fashion, and music. In Darwin’s theory, nature conducts numerous experiments and selects the most beneficial results from each generation. In Simonton’s theory, accomplished artists work the same way. 

Running lots of experiments is connected with a personality trait that, according to multiple studies, the best artists have in common: openness to experience. Personalities with high openness to experience are less dogmatic and more creative than personalities with low openness to experience. They also take more drugs. 

When the Mind Is Pried Open

John Lennon, who was given LSD by his dentist, said his first acid trip was “like ‘CinemaScope in real life’”; that is, reality experienced through a widened aperture. His best song in the druggy mode is “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (1967). The organ, played by Paul McCartney, warbles and smears like it’s drunk. The lyrics echo the feeling: “Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly.”

As the song builds, an echo effect pushes Lennon’s voice into the distance. The words are sung with conviction, but defeat understanding: “Rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies.” What are rocking horse people? Wooden centaurs? The phrase is an intuition as much as an image: anything is possible. It’s the same with “newspaper taxis” in the next verse. (Paul came up with that one.)

John Lennon’s technique in “Lucy” is similar to one recommended by Wilco songwriter Jeff Tweedy. In his book How to Write One Song (2020), Tweedy proposes exercises “aimed at loosening up the habitual way we use language.” One, which he calls making a “word ladder”, involves pairing words “that don’t normally work together,” such as sun and writes. That phrase, says Tweedy, “makes me think of a hidden world, full of mystery and clues, and alludes to an idea that the natural world might have intentions, might be trying to tell us something.” 

What else propels you to John Lennon levels of creativity? According to Simonton and his collaborator Rodica Ioana Damian, “The most common experiences among eminent geniuses are being an immigrant (or having some kind of minority status) and having some degree of familial unpredictability, that is, being less likely to grow up in stable, intact, majority-culture families” (2014).

To some extent, Lennon is an example of both. His father, Freddie, spent John’s growing-up years in the merchant navy. While he was gone, John’s mother, Julia, moved in with another man, and a sister, Mimi, raised John. Later, in John’s teens, Julia visited daily and taught him guitar chords. Then, just as they were growing close, she “died on him” (as he later thought of it) in a car accident. Lennon was 17. 

The death of John Lennon’s mother drew him closer to Paul McCartney, who had recently lost his mother to complications from breast cancer. In both young men, disruption became a catalyst for creativity. Paul’s first song was about his dead mother, and John wrote at least three songs about his. The best of these mother songs is “Julia“, from The White Album (aka, The Beatles, 1968).

Music critic Ian MacDonald explains why: “Julia Lennon was her son’s muse. Once he had rid his soul of his grief for her, his creativity forfeited its pressure and, during his more reconciled final decade, his output lost most of the edge and forcefulness it displayed at its fundamentally unhappy zenith in the mid-Sixties” (2005). In other words, the disruption in John’s life made him both miserable and creative.

A Life-Altering Grain of Sand

The other disruptive experience in John Lennon’s life was not immigration but marriage to a foreigner, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono. Their sexual relationship began after a late-night recording session in May 1968. Ten days later, the Beatles began tracking what has become known as The White Album. 

Geoff Emerick, who recorded most of the album, recalls the sessions as “difficult” and “contentious”. Paul McCartney “would refer to it as the ‘Tension Album’”. At one point, things got so bad that Ringo Starr, the most easygoing member of the Beatles, actually quit for two weeks. 

The most visible source of tension was Yoko Ono, who took her place at John Lennon’s side in the studio and offered suggestions freely. Emerick assumes – and perhaps the other Beatles did too – that Ono “had no musical background.” In fact, she had been taking piano lessons since the age of three. In high school, she trained for the opera and, at Sarah Lawrence, she studied composing. In 1961, she had a solo concert at Carnegie Hall. She was hardly a lightweight.

The point isn’t that her musical judgments were sound, or that she was the real genius behind The White Album and its sequels. No doubt “her presence at the sessions was,” in Emerick’s word, “disruptive”. Notably, if there is anything to Simonton’s research, disruption can be productive (when it’s not completely distracting). For John, who was in love with Yoko, the disruption was inspiring. For the others, it was irritating.

While creating The White Album was an infuriating process for the Beatles, the result was an artistic advance over Yellow Submarine, which they had recorded previously. Sometimes, as the oyster forms a pearl around an intrusive grain of sand, irritation inspires something new and beautiful. Yoko Ono’s role with the Beatles shouldn’t be exaggerated, but if she is considered partly to blame for the group’s break-up, she also deserves some credit for the band’s final bursts of creativity and John Lennon’s continuation into new songwriting.

Works Cited

Damian, Rodica Ioana, and Dean Keith Simonton. “Diversifying Experiences in the Development of Genius and their Impact on Creative Cognition”. in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius.

Emerick, Geoff, and Howard Massey. Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles. Avery-Penguin. 2006.

Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”. Psychological Review 100.3. 1993

Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown. 2008.

Lewisohn, Mark. Tune In, vol. 1 of The Beatles: All These Years. Penguin. 2013.

MacDonald, Ian. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. 3rd edn. Chicago Review, 2005.

Norman, Philip. John Lennon: The Life. HarperCollins. 2008.

Robert R. McCrae and David M. Greenberg, “Openness to Experience”. in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, ch. 12.

Simonton, Dean Keath, editor. The Wiley Handbook of Genius. Wiley. 2014

Simonton, Dean Keith. Genius 101. Springer, 2009.

Tweedy, Jeff. How to Write One Song. Dutton, 2020.