John Lennon answers on the Beatles split, Imagine, politics, and what he says he misses about being alive. Riffs and Beats asks. The replies are written in his voice.
Riffs and Beats
Looking back from where you are now, how do you view the end of The Beatles?
John Lennon
The band had reached the end of the run, worn out, famous, and in need of a stop. People tidy up the break-up in the retelling, but it was messy. Emotionally, spiritually. We were brothers, but also rivals. We had given each other everything and taken a lot, too. Ending it hurt, but staying together would have wrecked the thing people liked about the band. We were changing, each of us, and we couldn’t pretend to be the same four lads from Liverpool forever. If we hadn’t split, we might’ve ended up resenting the very thing we built.
Riffs and Beats
“Imagine” has become something like a global prayer. Did you know what you were unleashing when you wrote it?
John Lennon
Not in the slightest. I wrote it in a quiet moment, with Yoko nearby, feeling this strange mix of hope and defiance. It felt personal, almost naive. The words are simple. No religion, no borders, no greed. That plainness is what people held onto. The world keeps proving how hard those ideas are to live by, but the fact that people still sing it, and still gather round it in a crisis, tells me the song still lands. People want the picture it draws, even when they do not live it.
Riffs and Beats
How do you see the world today : politically, socially, spiritually?
John Lennon
It is hard to tell what is solid. People send a version of events back, and it is hard to see what is real. A lot of the politics is fear dressed up as strength. People are more connected than before, and lonelier at the same time. I think they are hungry for meaning, for a bit of quiet, for something that is not trying to sell them anything. There is still something to watch in protests, in art, in how people love. It sits under a lot of noise. Peace is harder to argue for when you cannot point at one clear enemy.
Riffs and Beats
What about today’s music? What reaches you, even from beyond?
John Lennon
Some of today’s music still has a pulse I like. You can hear people pushing back, and you can hear them saying what they feel. Kendrick Lamar goes a long way in. The anger and the care sit in the same songs. Phoebe Bridgers sings quietly, and the songs still hit hard. And there are these unknown kids recording heartbreak in their bedrooms with a laptop and no label, and it’s pure. What I miss sometimes is melody, real melody. But I also know music evolves, and it should. Music that takes no risk is the kind I still have no time for.
Riffs and Beats
You were never shy about politics. Would you still be vocal today?
John Lennon
More than ever. But I’d probably be banned off half the platforms. I always believed artists have a responsibility to agitate, not entertain. I would show up for the fights over justice, climate, race, peace, whatever was in front of me. But I’d also listen more. I was quick to shout in my time, sometimes before I understood. Now I would shout less and listen longer. You can’t change anything if you’re not willing to hear the people you disagree with.
Riffs and Beats
You were criticized in your time for contradictions, for ego. How do you reflect on that now?
John Lennon
Fair criticisms, honestly. I was a contradiction. I sang about peace and sometimes treated people like shit. I wanted to dismantle systems and still lived in a mansion. I think people expected purity from me but I was never interested in that. I was interested in truth, and truth is messy. I hurt people. I tried to make amends. I failed. But I never stopped trying to be better. That’s all I ever wanted : to grow, even if I stumbled doing it.
Riffs and Beats
How do you feel about the way fame has evolved with social media?
John Lennon
It’s fascinating and terrifying. Fame used to sit at a distance. Now it works like money. People build a brand, and then they perform it. It’s not just artists anymore. It’s kids, mothers, teachers, everyone competing for attention. And attention has become addictive, but hollow. If I had social media back then, God help us. I might’ve lost the plot entirely. Or maybe I’d have used it to call for revolution from my bathroom. Who knows? But I do know this: if people can see you all the time, the songs have less left to hide. I think the songs need that.
Riffs and Beats
If you could write one more song for today’s world, what would it be about?
John Lennon
Forgiveness. The plain kind, which is hard and not very glamorous. The kind that forces you to sit with what you’ve done, and what’s been done to you, and still choose not to pass that pain on. People are angry. People are hurt. Shouting into the dark does not sort it. I’d want to write something that makes people put the phone down, take a breath, and remember they’re human. A plain song about grace. No big finish.
Riffs and Beats
Is there anything about your legacy you wish people understood better?
John Lennon
That I asked more than I answered. Once you are gone, people turn you into a statue. They forget you were just a bloke trying to sort himself out with a guitar and some words. I was not a prophet. I was not even always right. I just asked the questions I needed to ask to stay alive, creatively, spiritually. If my songs helped someone feel less alone, then I did my job. That’s enough for me.
Riffs and Beats
Last one. What do you miss most about being alive?
John Lennon
The mess of it all. The sweat and sound and absurdity. Laughing until your ribs hurt. Arguing in the kitchen over nothing. That perfect chord you hit by accident. Yoko humming across the room. Julian’s awkward teenage jokes. The way life never sits still. Here it is peaceful, very peaceful, but I miss the mess that gave the days their point.
The interview stopped there. John stood, smiled with a bit of nostalgia and a bit of amusement, and said, “Keep playing.” Then he turned, barefoot as ever, and walked off.
