Grow Old with Me
"Grow Old with Me" is one of the final songs written by John Lennon. It was first recorded by Lennon as a demo while in Bermuda. A handwritten lyric sheet for the song is dated July 5, 1980. The song was first released on the posthumous album Milk and Honey in 1984. It was also rumoured to be among the songs planned as a possible reunion single by his former bandmates during the making of The Beatles Anthology.
Origins and inspiration
The song was inspired from two main sources: a poem penned by Robert Browning titled "Rabbi ben Ezra" and a song by Lennon's wife Yoko Ono called "Let Me Count the Ways." The latter had been inspired by Sonnets from the Portuguese Number 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.Lennon and Ono had for some time admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Browning. In fact, they thought they might be the couple reincarnated. Ono said "'Back when we were living in England in Ascot, John was reading this book about Robert and Elizabeth Browning. He said to me, 'We're just a reincarnation of Robert and Elizabeth Browning.' I said, 'Maybe.'" The two songs were purposely written with the couple in mind.
Ono woke up one morning in the summer of 1980 with the music of "Let Me Count the Ways" in her head. She rang Lennon in Bermuda to play it for him. Lennon loved the song, and Ono then suggested to him that he should write a Robert Browning piece to accompany it. They discussed having portraits of themselves as the Brownings on the cover of the album.
Lennon asked to have a collection of Browning's works sent. However, that afternoon, Yoko says in the liner notes to Milk and Honey, John was watching TV when a film came on which had the poem "Rabbi Ben Ezra" by Robert Browning in it. Inspired by this turn of events, Lennon wrote "Grow Old with Me" as an answer to Ono's song, and rang her back to play it to her over the phone.
In October 2020 it was reported that the baseball film which Lennon had been watching in Bermuda was A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story, about baseball player Lou Gehrig, who died of a rare nervous system disorder which later came to bear his name in popular media. In that movie, Eleanor Gehrig, played by Blythe Danner, reads a letter in which Lou Gehrig writes, "Thanks very much for sending me that book of poems. I especially liked the one by Robert Browning that goes, 'Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be'…"
Kenneth Womack made the discovery "after watching dozens in search of the mysterious film in question, I began to study TV guides from that period. John was a regular subscriber." Upon realizing A Love Affair had been screened at the time Lennon was staying in Bermuda, Womack made the connection, concluding: "The mystery, quite suddenly, was solved".
Musically, the earliest inspirations for "Grow Old With Me" trace all the way back to the summer of 1976 when Lennon wrote an un-released song called "Tennessee." That song was inspired by reading works of playwright Tennessee Williams, specifically "A Streetcar Named Desire."
"Over the next several months", according to "The Lost Lennon Tapes" host Elliot Mintz, that song morphed into another un-released song called "Howling at the Moon." Later, after reworking the "Tennessee" lyrics and putting those verses together with "Howling At The Moon," Lennon retitled the song "Memories."
The opening chords and cadence of what would become "Grow Old With Me" can clearly be heard in Take 2 of "Memories", as can what would become the descending ending chords of "Grow Old With Me". Lennon also sang part of the same melody to the lyrics of "Watching the Wheels" in that song's early stages of development.
The song "Memories" was top of mind as Lennon worked in Bermuda on a collection of old songs while also writing new ones. Womack writes, "During this same time, Lennon resuscitated his song fragment for "Memories," for which he double tracked the lead vocal and supplemented his original piano instrumentation, recorded at his home in The Dakota, with an improvisational acoustic guitar part."
Significance
"Grow Old with Me" is at times misattributed as Lennon's "last" or "final" song. This is inaccurate. A handwritten lyric sheet for the song is dated July 5, 1980. Lennon is known to have written other songs after that date. Among them, "Real Love" has a handwritten lyric sheet dated July 9, 1980 and "Cleanup Time" is dated July 20. The confusion might be due to the album liner notes, as Ono writes "the version that was left to us was John's last recording.". However, it appears Ono is referring to the version of the song rather than Lennon's final recording. It is well-established that Lennon recorded other songs subsequent to "Grow Old With Me," such as his work on Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice."The two songs, "Grow Old with Me" and "Let Me Count the Ways" were originally meant for inclusion on Double Fantasy. In fact, they were envisioned as the "backbone" of the album. However, Lennon and Ono, working on a tight deadline to get the album finished and released before Christmas, decided to postpone recording the songs until the following year for the planned Double Fantasy follow-up album, Milk and Honey. This never happened owing to Lennon's murder in December 1980.
Had the song been finished and recorded, Lennon and Ono envisioned "Grow Old with Me" as a "a standard, the kind that they would play in church every time a couple gets married" according to Ono. It was intended to have horns and a symphony as accompaniment.
"Grow Old with Me" had particular importance for Lennon and Ono collaborating on Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey. Womack writes, "In terms of the couple's collaboration, things began once and truly to unfold when Yoko shared her new song, 'Let Me Count the Ways.'" Womack also says of Lennon, "He was especially enamoured with the religiosity inherent in of the middle-eight, singing about a "world without end."" Paul DuNoyer writes that "Grow Old with Me" and "Let Me Count the Ways" are "at the very heart of Milk And Honey."
Of growing older, Ono said in a 1984 interview, "He was looking forward to it. He was always talking about, won't it be great when we're 80 and don't have to struggle any more, sitting in a rocking chair, getting letters from Sean."
Ono spoke about the particular significance of 'Let Me Count the Ways' and 'Grow Old with Me' to Lennon in a 2008 concert. "John told me that he loves me every day. But I was shy and only said, "Yes, thank you very much." So, he was very happy to hear 'Let Me Count the Ways' and he said, "You finally said I love you." And he made the answer song 'Grow Old with Me' for me."
In the 2010 reissue of the album, Ono said of Lennon, "the message of 'Grow Old With Me' could be interpreted in many ways to be his final wish."
Recording
The song was originally written and demo recorded with an acoustic guitar accompaniment. An assistant brought Lennon's Ovation guitar to the island the month prior. Presumably this guitar was used on the original demo recordings. Back in New York at the Dakota, Lennon recorded demos of the song on piano along with a rhythm box.At the time "Grow Old with Me" was written and the initial demos were made, Lennon was recording on a Sony CF-6500II boom box, referred to as the ZILBA'P, which had been purchased in Bermuda. He also used a National Panasonic RS-4360 DFT, specifically to double track songs.
Overall, several home recordings of the song were made by Lennon. However, all except the one released on Milk and Honey "disappeared." Recorded in the couple's bedroom on a cassette with a piano and rhythm box, this version was the last recording ever made of the song by Lennon and Ono.
Reissues
In 1998, at Ono's request, George Martin created an orchestrated version of the recording, which was released on the John Lennon Anthology box set. The orchestration was recorded at Abbey Road and mixed at Air Studios according to album notes. Martin's son, Giles Martin, plays the bass added to this version. The 1998 version was later included on the compilation Working Class Hero: The Definitive Lennon."Grow Old with Me" was remixed and remastered along with the rest of Milk and Honey in 2001. The song and album were remastered again in 2010.
In 2009, an acoustic version and an alternative piano arrangement came to light and now circulate among Lennon collectors. Some of these versions are available on YouTube but have never been officially released.
In 2020 a new mix of the "orchestrated version" was released on the compilation Gimme Some Truth. The song was mixed by Sam Gannon. The John Lennon Twitter account said that the version "used AI technology to isolate John's vocals from the piano and allowed Sean and the team to clean it up further and have more control in the mix."
The version has other significant differences from its predecessors. It starts with a different demo and then introduces Martin's orchestral arrangement after the first chorus, almost a minute into the song. Sean Lennon said "On 'Grow Old With Me,' I wound up having to do a kind of a hybrid of all these three different versions...I made some decisions there arrangement-wise that hadn't been before."
Personnel
;Milk and Honey- John Lennon – vocals, piano, rhythm box
- John Lennon – vocals, piano, rhythm box
- George Martin – producer, orchestral arrangement
- Giles Martin – assistant producer, bass
- Engineers – Andy Strange, Peter Cobbin, Steve Orchard
- Assistants – Ricky Graham, Chris Clark
- Audio restoration – Tony Cousins, Crispin Murray
Promotion
Shortly before the release of Milk and Honey, Yoko Ono is said to have commissioned 70 hand-crafted wood boxes made of Bermuda cedar as Christmas presents for friends and "a select few radio and music personalities." The boxes had an engraved silver plaque that reads "MILK & HONEY, LOVE, YOKO & SEAN, XMAS '83, N.Y.C." The box contained a cassette player that played the home recording of Lennon singing "Grow Old With Me."