Main Writer: Lennon
Recorded: February 28-March 2, 1967
Released: June 2, 1967
Not released as a single

Lennon always insisted that "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" was not a drug song. As he told Rolling Stone in 1970, "I swear to God or swear to Mao or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelled LSD." The inspiration was a picture that his four-year-old son, Julian, painted of Lucy O'Donnell, the girl who sat next to him at school. "He had sketched in some stars in the sky and called it 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,'" Lennon said. "Simple."

Lennon showed McCartney the painting one morning over tea, and they decided it was too great a title to pass up. The song is dominated by Lennon's love of childish whimsy like Through the Looking-Glass. Lennon came up with the image of "kaleidoscope eyes," McCartney with "cellophane flowers" and "newspaper taxis," and before long, they had a psychedelic nursery rhyme with wordplay worthy of Lewis Carroll. "The images were from Alice in Wonderland," Lennon said in 1980. "It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg, and it turns into Humpty Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep, and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere, and I was visualizing that."

In the Weybridge mansion where he wrote the song, Lennon spent most of his days alone, feeling numb in a collapsing marriage, watching TV and doing drugs. "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" was an image of hope. As he explained in 1980, "There was also the image of the female who would someday come save me — a 'girl with kaleidoscope eyes' who would come out of the sky. It turned out to be Yoko, though I hadn't met Yoko yet. So maybe it should be 'Yoko in the Sky With Diamonds.'"

Sadly, Lucy herself died in September 2009 of lupus, at the age of 46. Julian Lennon paid tribute to his former classmate by releasing a benefit single, "Lucy," a few weeks later. (Julian's original "Lucy" drawing is currently owned by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour.) When she first heard "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" as a teenager, she told her friends she was the Lucy who had inspired it. But they didn't believe her, informing her the song was about LSD. Lucy didn't argue because, as she admitted, "I was too embarrassed to tell them I didn't know what LSD was."

Appears On: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

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