John Lennon often talked about the fact that he wanted the verses to the songs that he wrote to have the same musical potency as the choruses. Although he never stated this intent, Lennon also had a knack for dropping lines into the middle of his songs that could stop you in your tracks with their profundity. In his classic song "Strawberry Fields Forever", a couplet in the second verse summed up much of what the song was meant to convey. And it also provided a stunning glimpse into just how Lennon saw himself within the wider world.
As The Beatles prepared to make new music in 1967, John Lennon and Paul McCartney originally gave themselves a brief to write about their childhoods. Although they soon abandoned the idea, it stuck around long enough to influence the songs that would serve as the band's first single of the year, a double A-side.
McCartney wrote "Penny Lane". The song takes a specific look at the people and places he remembered encountering as a kid. Lennon based "Strawberry Fields Forever" around a local park area within the grounds of a Salvation Army home. But the location simply served as a touchstone for happier memories, a la Rosebud in Citizen Kane.
Instead, most of the song deals with Lennon's struggles to make sense of his life at the time. Throughout the lyrics, he adopts a conversational style to communicate with those that he's addressing. The directness of the approach stands as a far cry from the stylized lyrics of most pop songs of the era.
In the first verse, he suggests that people live their lives behind a veil to protect themselves from the truth. "Living is easy with eyes closed," he sings. "Misunderstanding all you see." "It's getting hard to be someone," Lennon explains. He then backtracks somewhat as if he's trying not to scare his companion. "But it all works out," he hedges.
In the final verse, Lennon stammers around, afraid to commit to anything too concrete. "I think I know, I mean, ah yes/But it's all wrong/That is, I think I disagree," he sings. The refrains paint the titular location as both illusory and a respite from the stark realities of the world: "Nothing to get hung about".
It's the second verse where Lennon, almost clandestinely, slips in the meatiest lines of the song. "No one, I think, is in my tree," he opines. "I mean it must be high or low." In interviews after the fact, Lennon explained that he was referring to his own feelings of otherness in the world with these lines.
What's striking is how these lines, written about how Lennon could feel alternately superior and inferior to those around him, apply so easily to his audience. While few of us could ever hope to reach the artistic heights that Lennon did, it's fair to say that most of us have felt isolated from even our closest friends and/or family at one time or another. That metaphorical tree has been occupied by many.
"Strawberry Fields Forever" is rightly praised for its mesmerizing music. But spare some of that praise for that couplet in the second verse. It gives us a reason why we'd need such idyllic getaway locations in the first place.