How Do You Sleep? (John Lennon song)

After the Beatles broke up, John Lennon and Paul McCartney's relationship had soured.^[1] The latter released a series of questions-and-answers on 9 April in which he said he would break from the Beatles for at least some time, and the tabloid Daily Mirror spun the statement into the headline "PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES" the next day. Lennon was livid; he wanted to announce the band's split first.^[2][3] According to author Peter Ames Carlin, his resentment against McCartney caused by the announcement spilled out in his controversial, fiery Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner in 1970;^[4] Lennon had recently undergone primal therapy.^[5] There, he tore apart the public perception of the Beatles and the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership, ranting frankly against much of his Beatles songs, many of the people in the group's orbit and the band's opposition to having his wife Yoko Ono in the studio. He presented McCartney as a conceited control freak and falsely stated that they had stopped writing songs together in 1962.^[6] Lennon had also called McCartney's self-named 1970 album "rubbish" on another occasion.^[7]

McCartney responded by composing "Too Many People",^[8] whose lines such as "Too many people preaching practices" refer to his erstwhile bandmate.^[9] Following the song's release on his and his wife Linda's album Ram in May 1971, Lennon felt attacked and found other examples of McCartney insulting him.^[10] He thought that other songs on the album, such as "3 Legs", contained similar attacks, but McCartney denied that.^[11] Some interpreted a full-page advertisement the McCartneys put out in the music press as an act of mockery of Lennon and Ono.^[12] The advertisement was a photo of them in their Halloween costumes (the couple were wrapped in a sheet, wearing a clown mask and a Wimpy mask, respectively) which some reporters perceived as a reference to bagism.^[13][14]

Lennon addressed these attacks with "How Do You Sleep?", released on the album Imagine in September 1971.^[15][16][17] It was written in the aftermath of McCartney's lawsuit in the London High Court dissolving the Beatles as a legal partnership,^[18] itself caused in part by the publication of the Rolling Stone interview.^[13] Further to this, Lennon included a photo of himself holding a pig's head in the Imagine packaging to mock Ram's album cover.^[4]

Lennon recorded "How Do You Sleep?" on 26 May 1971 at Ascot Sound Studios, during the sessions for his Imagine album. String overdubs took place on 4 July 1971 at the Record Plant, in New York City.^[23] The song features a slide guitar part by George Harrison.^[24] Aside from Lennon on rhythm guitar and vocals, the track also includes Klaus Voormann on bass, Alan White on drums, acoustic guitar played by Ted Turner, Rod Linton and Andy Davis, and additional piano parts by Nicky Hopkins and John Tout.^[19] Although he had been united with Lennon, Ringo Starr and Klein against McCartney in the lawsuit,^[25] Harrison recalled that the period was one of "very strange, intense feelings" among all the former Beatles, and he was initially wary of Lennon's invitation to play on the new album. Given this, Harrison added, he was relieved that Lennon was "openly pleased I came".^[26] The song was co-produced by Lennon, Phil Spector, and Yoko Ono.

As with all the tracks on Imagine, several outtakes of "How Do You Sleep?" became available on bootleg albums and in documentary films about Lennon. A run-through of the song in the 2000 film Gimme Some Truth includes what authors Chip Madinger and Mark Easter describe as "John's query to Paul", as Lennon faces the camera and sings: "How do you sleep, ya cunt?"^[27] Starr visited the studio during the recording of the song and was reportedly upset, saying: "That's enough, John."^[19] In 2018, two versions of the original recording sessions were released in 5.1 surround sound as part of the Imagine box set.^[28]

In a contemporary review of Imagine, Ben Gerson of Rolling Stone highlighted "How Do You Sleep?" among the album's three "really worthy, musically effective numbers" but found it "horrifying and indefensible" as a song that "lay waste to Paul's character, family and career". Gerson concluded: "The motives for 'Sleep' are baffling. Partly it is the traditional bohemian contempt for the bourgeois; partly it is the souring of John's long-standing competitive relationship with Paul."^[29] Writing in the NME, Alan Smith said of the track: "Musically, it's tremendous – open, big, powerful, thundering, dramatic – but this is a song which will be remembered for its lyrics". As its ultimate putdown of McCartney, Smith identified the couplet "The sound you make is muzak to my ears / You must've learned something in all those years."^[30] In Melody Maker, Roy Hollingworth called Imagine the best work Lennon had ever done and described "How Do You Sleep?" as "the unnerving slash at McCartney … a slow funk with Commanche or maybe Sioux flavoured strings".^[31]

Thomas MacFarlane wrote in Lennon and McCartney: Painting with Sound:^[32]

The space created for "How Do You Sleep?" seems to be a photo negative of the one created for Imagine. ... Here, it seems as if a storm is brewing, and its awesome power will not be denied.

A few months after Imagine was released, Lennon said the song "was an answer to Ram" but added:

There's really no feud between me and Paul. It's all good, clean fun. No doubt there will be an answer to 'Sleep' on his next album, but I don't feel that way about him at all. It works as a complete song with no relation to Paul. It works as a piece of music. I started writing it in 1969, and the line 'So Sergeant Pepper Took You By Surprise' was written about two years before anything happened. There was always a musical difference between me and Paul – it didn't just happen last year. But we've always had a lot in common, and we still do. The thing that made The Beatles what they were was the fact that I could do my rock 'n' roll and Paul could do the pretty stuff ... But hardly a week goes by when I don't see and/or hear from one of them.^[33]

While saying at the time that "How Do You Sleep?" was "silly ... [He] says the only thing I did was 'Yesterday', and he knows that's wrong", McCartney admitted to liking Imagine.^[34] He remembered in his 2025 book on Wings that after hearing "How Do You Sleep?", he almost wrote a song called "Quite Well, Thank You". He discarded it since he disliked the idea of writing an answer song.^[35] Following their writing songs against each other throughout the year and Lennon's Rolling Stone interview, McCartney wrote "Dear Friend" as a way to reconcile with Lennon.^[36] He explained in a 1994 interview:

After John had slagged me off in public, I had to think of a response, and it was either going to [reciprocate] – and some instinct stopped me, which I'm really glad about – or do something else. So, I worked on my attitude and wrote "Dear Friend", saying, in effect, let's lay the guns down, let's hang up our boxing gloves.^[37]

It was released on his new band Wings' first album Wild Life in December 1971.^[38][a] However, Beatles historian Peter Doggett asserts that McCartney did not stay true to the resigned spirit expressed in "Dear Friend", as he kept dwelling on their business problems and "talking about money", in the words of his assistant Shelley Turner.^[40] But by the time of Lennon's death in 1980, cordial relations had been re-established between the pair.^{[citation needed]} He said in a 2018 press release: "... it would have been terrible if he'd been killed as things were at that point and I'd never got to straighten it out with him."^[41][42] McCartney imagined that Lennon once heard "Dear Friend" even though they never discussed the song with each other.^[43]

Shortly before his death, Lennon said in an interview with Playboy: "I used my resentment against Paul … to create a song … not a terrible vicious horrible vendetta … I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and The Beatles, and the relationship with Paul, to write 'How Do You Sleep'. I don't really go round with those thoughts in my head all the time".^[44]

Per:^{[citation needed]}

• John Lennon – vocals, guitar (Epiphone Casino)
• George Harrison – slide guitar (Fender Stratocaster)
• Nicky Hopkins – Wurlitzer electric piano
• John Tout – piano
• Ted Turner – acoustic guitar
• Rod Linton – acoustic guitar
• Andy Davis – acoustic guitar
• Klaus Voormann – bass
• Alan White – drums
• The Flux Fiddlers^[b] – strings