A few possible song inspirations | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Okay, here are some apparent sources of inspiration for a few of the Beatles’ songs which have been on my mind for some time but which I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere or haven’t been able to confirm (or disconfirm). I’ll lay them out here in case anyone would like to argue about them. I don’t have a deep Beatles library so it’s perfectly possible that some of these have been in black and white somewhere for ages.

(Sorry if this is in the wrong section, but there doesn’t seem to be a more obvious place for it and I didn’t want to split it into separate posts for each song.)

• “Can’t Buy Me Love “: This one is something I’m pretty sure I didn’t notice myself. I’m sure I recall one of the Beatles in the Anthology video saying that “Can’t Buy Me Love ” was a conscious attempt to write something in the style of Peggy Lee’s “Fever”, but I haven’t been able to confirm it. I didn’t imagine that, did I?
• “In My Life “: There’s a resemblance between the words—not the original “bus trip” lyrics, but the version that actually got recorded—and those of “Non, je ne regrette rien” which may or may not be more than a simple coincidence. The telling bit is the new-lover conceit—”And these memories lose their meaning/When I think of love as something new” and so on—which is introduced with the second verse. This doesn’t seem to have any precedent in Lennon’s actual life up to then—obviously he was over a year from first meeting Ono, and he never seems to have loved Cynthia like that—but it does echo the ending of “Non, je ne regrette rien”: “Because my life, because my joys/Today, they start with you” (“Car ma vie, car mes joies/Aujourd’hui, ça commence avec toi”). On the other hand it’s clearly not impossible that Lennon could have come up with the idea completely independently: for one thing he was already yearning for some kind of ideal woman, and for another it’s a relatively obvious way to give the lyric resolution and steer it back into safe love-song territory. (Shirley Bassey actually had a small top-40 hit with a version of “Non, je ne regrette rien” in mid-’65, but I assume it probably wasn’t a factor.) If you do assume that “Non, je ne regrette rien” was an influence on the lyrics, then when you squint at the “In Your Life” melody it’s not too hard to imagine “Non, je ne regrette rien” as a possible starting-point for the work on that too. It certainly doesn’t seem more of a stretch than the reported Smokey Robinson influence.
• “And Your Bird Can Sing “: Little uncertainty here: lyrically it’s Lennon’s take on “The Nightingale” by Hans Christian Andersen. Cut-and-pasting myself from elsewhere:
   

  It has to be mostly about “The Nightingale” by Hans Christian Andersen. The narrator is the nightingale, the person he’s addressing is more or less the Emperor of China, and “your bird” is the singing mechanical bird. In Andersen’s story, the mechanical bird can be understood by the rational, analytical mind, which is why the emperor’s music-master, a clever intellectual, likes it so much. The nightingale represents real beauty and creative genius, which cannot be owned, controlled or even fully understood; but it’s he who returns to save the emperor when the mechanical bird is indeed (partly) broken and the emperor is deathly ill. It’s easy to see how Lennon, a creative but mostly unschooled songwriter—and someone who felt himself an outsider in the world of the wealthy and educated—would want to identify himself with Andersen’s nightingale.

• “Across The Universe “: Musically it’s clear this was developed from “Over the Rainbow”, particularly the middle eight and the famous “If pretty little bluebirds fly…” coda. (Not only was “Over the Rainbow” one of the Beatles’ old cabaret-friendly numbers (“we thought it was Gene Vincent, so we were happy to do it“) but it was Lennon who sang it!)