Will Lee recently did a great (almost) solo version of John Lennon’s ‘I’m A Loser’ (listen below, along with The Beatles’ original version). It reminded me of how much I like the song and made me want to take a closer look.

Like other Lennon songs of that period, such as ‘Help’, it combines bouncy, energetic music with dark lyrics. When I first heard it, I was so caught up in the groove that I missed the desolation.

This may have been where Lennon was at then – making beat music for millions of fans but depressed underneath. But it’s also a common strategy for interesting songs – working on two emotional levels at once.

Except for the Chorus the lyrics of ‘I’m A Loser’ are nothing special. If you told me John had written them in half an hour (or less?) it wouldn’t surprise me. They’re commonplace, but by then Lennon’s skill level was so high that the words, even when mispronounced, flow out smoothly and feel natural and ‘right’.

Since many of his songs were so lyrically creative, it’s easy to wonder why this one isn’t (and don’t worry, I came to praise this song, not to bury it – as if I could). John and Paul were churning out an insane amount of material at this point. They were in the middle of an explosion of condensed songwriting brilliance never equaled or surpassed before or since – hundreds of good-to-great-to-timeless songs in about 5 years. Every one couldn’t be a soup-to-nuts masterpiece. Also, John was known to have a lazy streak… maybe he thought these lyrics were ‘good enough’ (and, if he did, he was right).

All that said, even given the strong lyric in the Chorus and the musicality of the lyric, what puts the song over the top is its music. There are some interesting twists – as expected with Lennon & McCartney.

The Verse chords:

||: G | D | F+2 | G | G | Dsus4 | F+2 | G :||

The use of the F chord in a song so otherwise diatonic, in the key of ‘G’, adds the special sauce. A lesser writer would’ve probably settled for an Aminor or C chord and adjusted the melody accordingly. (Lennon does a similar thing with an F chord in the key of G in his ‘I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party’.)

Also, it’s an F+2 (that’s an F triad with a G added) so, except for the 3rd and 11th bars, the G note rings at the top of all the chords in the Verse. (Will keeps the high G ringing through the whole Verse and it also sounds fantastic.)

The Verse melody is unusual for its range. Except for the 2nd and 4th lines of the Verse, the song’s entire melody is within the range of a 5th – ‘G’ up to ‘D’. But in those 2nd and 4th lines John drops down a full octave, outlining a G7 arpeggio down to a low G… and making the song’s overall range a challenging octave and a fifth. And more memorable for it.

The Chorus is simpler and puts across its straightforward message (‘I’m A Loser and I lost someone who’s dear to me – I’m A Loser and I’m not what I appear to be‘) using G diatonic chords, but again adding a straight F chord:

|| Aminor | D | Aminor | D | G | Eminor | Aminor | F D ||

Some of my favorite songs have a bittersweet flavor created by words that seem to be at odds with the music. When this juxtaposition works it creates a uniquely powerful spectrum of emotions… because they all happen at the same time.

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