John Lennon on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"

"This was written in my Dylan days for the film Help!. When I was a teenager I used to write poetry, but was always trying to hide my real feelings.

"I was in Kenwood and I would just be songwriting and so every day I would attempt to write a song and it's one of those that you sort of sing a bit sadly to yourself, 'Here I stand, head in hand...'

"I started thinking about my own emotions--I don't know when exactly it started, like 'I'm a Loser' or 'Hide Your Love Away' or those kind of things--instead of projecting myself into a situation I would just try to express what I felt about myself which I'd done in me books. I think it was Dylan helped me realise that--not by any discussion or anything but just my hearing his work--I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing pop songs; he would turn out a certain style of song for a single and we would do a certain style of thing for this and the other thing. I was already a stylized songwriter on the first album. But to express myself I would write Spaniard in the Works or In His Own Write, the personal stories which were expressive of my personal emotions. I'd have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the sort of meat market, and I didn't consider them--the lyrics or anything--to have any depth at all. They were just a joke. Then I started being me about the songs, not writing them objectively, but subjectively."