10 Perfect Songs That Had To Wait Years To Become Hits

By the time that the Beatles were breaking up, every single member had almost become bigger than the band itself. For all of the great songs to fall on records like Abbey Road, the lives of John, Paul, George, and Ringo were quickly going separate ways, with each solo album having songs that were leagues above the kind of stuff that they were writing in their prime. Those Beatle sentiments do tend to linger though, and one of John Lennon's first showstoppers was actually a leftover from the Fab days.

Although many fans are quick to judge everything Lennon wrote as a reaction to the Beatles breakup, Jealous Guy was almost a different song entirely, originally titled Child of Nature after the band's trip to India to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Taking lines from his teachings, the song was quickly shelved once Paul McCartney came up with Mother Nature's Son, which was a bit too similar to what John had been working with.

The John we got to know on Imagine was a lot more in tune with his past behavior, re-sculpting the song entirely as an apology for all of the awful behavior that he had gotten into in his life. This new version doesn't paint John in the best light, but it was a lot more necessary than what we would have gotten on Child of Nature. Whereas the first song was just someone taking about the joys of the world around us, this song shows us the paranoid man behind those circular eyeglasses, being just as vulnerable and pleading for forgiveness from all the wrong that he's done as a youngster.