Written by: Lennon
Recorded: November 1980
Producers: John Lennon, Yoko Ono
Released: 23 January 1984
John Lennon: vocals, piano
Available on:
Milk And Honey
John Lennon Anthology
Wonsaponatime
Based on a poem by Robert Browning, Grow Old With Me was one of John Lennon 's final recordings. It was released on the posthumous 1984 collection Milk And Honey .
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5.47pm

18 April 2013

Looks like Paul and Ringo covered this:
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Ahhh Girl, Bongo, Richard"This Beatles talk bores me to death.” —John Lennon
11.41am

28 March 2014

8.38am

Reviewers
17 December 2012

As @Joe notes in his article about this song, it was partly inspired by John watching a movie about baseball:
Later that day Lennon called Ono to say he had been watching a 1950s film about a baseball player, in which the player's girlfriend had sent him a poem by Robert Browning. Lennon hurriedly wrote Grow Old With Me based on the words, which were taken from the poem Rabbi Ben Ezra.
Which film it was was unknown, but it seems Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack has identified the film: discovering a 1978 made-for-TV movie called A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story was shown on TV in Bermuda while John was there and the song was written.
Womack told the Observer that Lennon had clearly been moved by a scene in which Eleanor – played by Blythe Danner – reads a letter in which Gehrig referred to the first lines from Rabbi Ben Ezra, Browning’s 1864 historical poem inspired by a 12th-century scholar.
"Thanks very much for sending me that book of poems. I especially liked the one by Robert Browning that goes, 'Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be'…"
More here.
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Moderators
15 February 2015

Browning is nice 🙂 and I do love this song. I just love the idea of loving someone enough to want to spend your twilight years with them, being boring but content. Very wholesome.
In context, obviously, it's quite heartbreaking
it verges from the sublime to the ridiculote
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