(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 24 February 2026 15:18, UK
In an ironic twist of fate, the final single that John Lennon released in his lifetime before his tragic murder in 1980 would be ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’, a rockabilly send-up with a message of renewal and revitalisation. Lennon was coming into a new decade and had a new lease on life following a two-month trip to Bermuda, where he finished writing the material that would eventually appear on Double Fantasy.
“‘Starting Over’ and ‘Cleanup Time’ were sorta written on the run after I’d finished all the other work of writing the other ones,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “They just sort of came. They were like the fun after the work is finished. I was still in Bermuda.”
A bouncy and lighthearted track, ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ featured Lennon, affecting an old-school rock and roll vocal cadence throughout the song. The rollicking shuffle was Lennon’s tip of the cap to some of his influences. Dylan has always been a part of Lennon’s best work. The singer-songwriter had a huge hand in helping Lennon realise that his best course of action for writing great music was allowing his own thoughts and feelings to come to the fore.
Dylan was the man behind a lot of the earliest moments of Lennon’s best work. But, for the most part, it was Dylan’s early work that grabbed him. This time, while explaining the song’s genesis, Lennon compared it to what Bob Dylan did on his 1969 country music album Nashville Skyline.
“All through the taping of ‘Starting Over’, I was calling what I was doing ‘Elvis Orbison’. It’s like Dylan doing Nashville Skyline, except I don’t have any Nashville, being from Liverpool,” Lennon explained. But it wasn;t just Dylan who inspired the singer, it was a couple of other icons who had direct inspiration on the sound of the track. He explained, “So I go back to the records I know – Elvis and Roy Orbison and Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis.”
(Credits: Far Out / Tony Barnard / Los Angeles Times / UCLA Library)
The latter two names are ever-present in the list of Lennon’s inspiration, but the majority of this track was born out of Dylan, Orbison and Elvis.
“It was really called ‘Starting Over’ but, while we’re making it, people kept putting things out with the same title,” Lennon told Addy Peebles in 1980. “You know, there’s a country and western hit [by Tammy Wynette] called ‘Starting Over’, so I added ‘Just Like’ at the last minute. And to me, it was like going back to 15 and singing à la Presley. All the time I was referring to John [Smith], the engineer, here in the room, I was referring to Elvis Orbison. It’s kinda like… ‘Only The Lonely’, you know… a kind of parody but not really parody.”
“I’d done that music and identified with it – that was my period – but I’d never written a song that sounded like that period,” he told Sheff. “So I just thought, Why the hell not? In the Beatles days, that would have been taken as a joke. One avoided clichés. Course now clichés are not clichés anymore.”
Clichés were one thing, but Lennon was a bit self-conscious of another part of the song. During the chorus, Lennon sings, “It’s time to spread our wings and fly.” Not wanting to make any direct allusions to Paul McCartney’s band under the same name, Lennon nearly changed the phrase before deciding to leave it in. “I nearly took the word ‘wings’ out because I thought, ‘Oh, God!’ They’ll all be saying, ‘What’s this about Wings?’ It has nothin’ to do with Wings,” Lennon confirmed.
John Lennon has always been a sincere songwriter and not just in his words but in appreciating his influences too. While many have pointed to the star’s ego as a huge driver of his creative endeavours, he rarely held back in sharing appreciation for the men who shaped his style. On this song, he was just a little bit more explicit than most.
Check out ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ down below.
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