Nowhere Man (song)
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- This article is about the pop music song. For other uses, see Nowhere Man.
| “Nowhere Man” | |||||
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| Single by The Beatles from the album Rubber Soul (UK) Yesterday and Today (U.S.) |
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| B-side | "What Goes On" | ||||
| Released | 15 February 1966 (U.S.) | ||||
| Format | 7" | ||||
| Recorded | Abbey Road Studios 21 October 1965, remade 22 October |
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| Genre | Psychedelic Pop | ||||
| Length | 2:44 | ||||
| Label | Parlophone (UK) Capitol (U.S.) 5587 |
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| Writer(s) | Lennon/McCartney | ||||
| Producer | George Martin | ||||
| The Beatles singles chronology | |||||
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| Rubber Soul track listing | |||||
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| Yellow Submarine Songtrack track listing | |||||
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"Nowhere Man" is a song by British 1960s rock group The Beatles, from their hit album Rubber Soul (in the U.S. on the Yesterday ... and Today album). Though the songwriting credit is Lennon/McCartney, it was actually penned almost entirely by John Lennon. (Paul McCartney helped to "polish off the rough edges."[1]) It was recorded on October 21st and 22nd, 1965. "Nowhere Man" is among the very first Beatles songs to be entirely unrelated to romance or love, and marks a notable instance of Lennon's philosophically-oriented songwriting. It was released as a single 15 February and reached #1 in Canada and #3 on the Billboard Hot 100.
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[edit] Interpretation
When the song first appeared during the 1960s, many of the Beatles youthful fan base interpreted the rather hard-edged lyric, which satirizes the "Nowhere Man" as someone who "just sees what he wants to see" and who "don't know what [he's] missing", as directed against their parents' generation and conformism generally.
Lennon, however, claimed that he himself was the subject of the song. He wrote it after racking his brain in desperation for five hours, trying to come up with another song for Rubber Soul. "I'd actually stopped trying to think of something," he said. "Then I thought of myself as Nowhere Man — sitting in his nowhere land."[citation needed] Lennon told Playboy: "I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then 'Nowhere Man' came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down."[2]
If factual, Lennon's explanation places the song with Lennon's earlier "I'm a Loser" and later introspective and self-critical songs, both as a Beatle ("Yer Blues") and as a solo artist ("Jealous Guy"), rather than Lennon's "counter-culture" songs such as "The Word" and "All You Need is Love" (as it was perceived at the time).
McCartney said of the song: "That was John after a night out, with dawn coming up. I think at that point, he was a bit...wondering where he was going and to be truthful so was I. I was starting to worry about him. "[3]
[edit] Other recordings
The British folk group The Settlers recorded the song in 1966. In 1976, Jeff Lynne of ELO recorded it for the evanescent musical documentary All This and World War II. The song was also performed by the Bee Gees in the 1978 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band film, with Barry Gibb on lead vocals.
Also, in 1967, the Carpenters performed a piano/vocal version in Joe Osborn's garage studio. In the late '90s/early '00s, Richard tried to de-noise the tracks after it was nearly destroyed from a fire in Joe Osborn's house in 1973, and added strings and woodwind lines to the song.
In 1996, it was recorded as an acoustic version by the hard rock group Dokken on the One Live Night album.
[edit] Animated character
In the animated movie Yellow Submarine (1968) The Beatles, on their way to save Pepperland from the Blue Meanies, encounter Jeremy Hilary Boob, Ph. D., a strange, little, brown-furred man with a blue face, pink ears, and tail, who lives in the Sea of Nothing, speaks in rhyme, and describes himself as an "eminent physicist, polyglot classicist, prize-winning botanist, hard-biting satirist, talented pianist, good dentist too." The band realizes one of their songs sums Jeremy up well and they sing "Nowhere Man" about him as they cavort with his magic in his nowhere land.
[edit] References
- Turner, Steve. A Hard Day's Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles' Song, Harper, New York: 1994, ISBN 0-06-095065-X
