15 Dynamic, Surprising and Quintessential John Lennon Beatles Vocals
by Colin Fleming
George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Washington, D.C., 1964 (YouTube screen shot)
No one else sings like John Lennon, who may have been the possessor of the ultimate rock and roll voice. Something about Lennon—especially early Lennon—sounds like rock and roll at its very core: the spirit of the thing from the back of the throat.
A quintessential Lennon Beatles vocal could occur at any time, in any spot: on a demo tape, a rehearsal take, a radio broadcast. Round up some of your favorites, and you have quite the concept album on your hands for the delight of your ears.
It’s fun to go in reverse order and build to a peak, but everything here is at the toppermost of the John Lennon vocal mountain.
15. “Help!”
He screams it—not like “Twist and Shout,” but screaming all the same. The voice is a controlled form of ragged in those instances when it is left on its own to hang in the air. Said suspensions are like lines in a conversation that need—and know they will have to wait for—an answer. “Help!” presages the writing and singing styles of “Strawberry Fields Forever” in this fashion, the difference being the singer of “Strawberry Fields” can and will answer himself. Evolution.
14. “Girl”
So English as to be Chaucerian. A pastoral, but urban and modish. The voice is an instrument, but here it somehow manages to be more assertive as one. It carries the song to greater degree than the basso continuo.
13. “Across the Universe” (take 6)
A late-period return to the vocal timbre we last heard in 1964. Notice how he becomes more confident the further he goes.
12. “I’ll Be Back”
He just leans back into the number, lets the voice do the work. Singing to others by singing to yourself.
11. “Yes It Is” (take 1)
A (mostly) private moment in which the vocal is the window to the man. Realism done up as druggy lullaby.
10. “I’m in Love” (demo)
Tooling around and tooling magically. Lennon ventures into “mocker” territory a number of times—in the cut-up sense that Ringo Starr riffs off of in the press conference sequence of A Hard Day’s Night—but he never loses the song’s path, a form of purity.
9. “To Know Her Is to Love Her” (BBC)
Breathy and dreamy like love, both first and lasting. The voice in the nude, no shame.
8. “Where Have You Been (All My Life)” (Star Club)
The perfect rock and roll singer by way of rhythm and blues and understanding the union. No one could dig into a vocal like Lennon—it’s like drilling a hole in a rock to stick in a metal peg for a better hold. Then he opens up the chest on the coda, which is both what we’ve been waiting for and what we didn’t know was coming.
7. “Baby It’s You” (BBC)
A cold lends charm to the Please Please Me version—young man from the north carries on at first album session—but this is what that performance would have been minus the illness. You can want to be tough, come across as hard, but to give yourself over to what you love is where it’s at and the toughness that need not pretend to be tough. Lennon always understood that as a singer, if not as a person.
The bit before the first falsetto break—when Lennon’s voice is single-tracked—is the single purest expression of his purest rock and roll voice. This is as classic at the classic Lennon voice ever got.
5. “Johnny B. Goode” (BBC)
Lennon sounds like he’s singing about everything he has ever loved on this 1964 Beeb cut, and also singing as if he sees himself squarely in the middle of the dream he had, which he’s now living. The cover is a masterpiece. Every source you read on the subject will tell you it’s dreck, because that’s what someone said first, and then what everyone went with. Not only must we think for ourselves in this life, we must listen for ourselves, too. Chuck Berry’s lines course like poetry, and so does Lennon’s voice. Listen to how he travels atop the stream.
Related: The Beatles at the BBC, July 16, 1963
4. “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby” (BBC)
A warning song, but a warming vocal. More of a declaration about her than a threat to him. Asks a lot of Lennon’s range and timing.
3. “A Day in the Life” and “A Day in the Life” (take 1)
My sense was that George Martin, speaking about this particular take, considered it the best singing he’d ever heard. The vocal on the finished song is akin to an element, like the wind and the rain, whereas the vocal on take 1 is both elementarily human and more than human. Terrifying, and yet a protective embrace.
2. “Strawberry Fields Forever” (take 1)
The vocal on the official version is pinched, nasal, hard. Not a criticism. Take 1 has the voice of possibility, of the wonder one has known, and remembers, and would like to know again elsewhere. It’s the voice that has to tell you a story, and its story. You want that voice—it’s the most important one.
1. “Soldier of Love” (BBC)
This is the alien vocal. If an alien comes down from somewhere, and you play the alien this, and more so than with just about anything you can give the alien, there’s no learning curve. They get it right away. “Oh, that’s what rock and roll singing can be and is meant to be but has hardly ever been.” If you are or were at some point, however briefly, the vocal incarnation of rock and roll, you would have had a vocal like this. Maybe just the one, but you would have had it.
[John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s non-violent political activism, influential peace and protest anthems, and the couple’s early years in New York City are explored and celebrated in a massive new 12-disc boxed set entitled Power To The People (Super Deluxe Edition). The collection, via Capitol/UMe, arrives on October 10, 2025, one day after Lennon would have been 85. The Super Deluxe Edition is available to pre-order in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.]
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