"Nowhere Man" By The Beatles Video Showcase

"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".) It was recorded on October 21 and 22, 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.

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 wracking 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."

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."

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."

Read the Wikipedia article about Nowhere Man (song)...

Photo author: erglantz from flickr.com