Nobody Told Me

I’ve been immersing myself in a lot of Beatles and John Lennon stuff lately – a couple great books by Kenneth Womack and Ian Leslie, the “One To One” concert doc, and started to dig into the revised Anthology series.

But something unexpected inspired me recently. I was running errands and Lennon’s “Nobody Told Me” came on a Sirius channel other than the Beatles one. It brought me back to when I first remember hearing it when it was released posthumously in early 1984, and I was about to turn 12. I turned up the volume, savoring its hooks, especially the bit where the riff pauses for just a second then lets the next beat drop.

My dad had passed about two years before that, and Lennon a bit over three years prior. This song caught my attention as a kid, before I was even all that familiar with the Beatles history and catalog. The passionate, repeated refrain of “nobody told me there’d be days like these” amplified the anger I felt after losing a parent while young.

I was already a moody kid and that would get worse as I grew up. 

All these years and decades later, having lived through many, many more “days like these,” the song captures those occasional feelings of self-pity. But singing along with it, the song starts to feel like a defiant anthem. The protagonist’s message is “I’m still here.”

My memoir, "Snapshot Of A Warped Man," is available through Amazon here.