‘Watching The Wheels’/’Yes, I’m Your Angel’ was the final single to be released from ‘Double Fantasy‘ on 27 Mar 1981.

“It’s a song version of the love letter from John and Yoko. It’s an answer to ‘What have you been doing?’ ‘Well, I’ve been doing this – watchin’ the wheels.'”

– John Lennon, 1980

John: The last album I did before Double Fantasy was Rock ‘n’ Roll, with a cover picture of me in Hamburg in a leather jacket. At the end of making that record, I was finishing up a track that Phil Spector had made me sing called ‘Just Because’, which I really didn’t know – all the rest I’d done as a teenager, so I knew them backwards – and I couldn’t get the hang of it.

At the end of that record, I started spieling and saying, ‘And so we say farewell from the Record Plant,’ and a little thing in the back of my mind said, ‘Are you really saying farewell?’

I hadn’t thought of it then. I was still separated from Yoko and still hadn’t had the baby, but somewhere in the back, a voice was saying, Are you saying farewell to the whole game?’ It just flashed by like that – like a premonition. I didn’t think of it until a few years later, when I realized that I had actually stopped recording.

I came across the cover photo – the original picture of me in my leather jacket, leaning against the wall in Hamburg – and I thought, ‘Is this it? Do I start where I came in, with “Be-Bop-A-Lula”?’

The day I met Paul I was singing that song for the first time onstage.

There’s a photo in all the Beatles books – a picture of me with a checked shirt on, holding a little acoustic guitar and I am singing ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula,’ just as I did on that album. And there’s a picture in Hamburg and I’m saying goodbye from the Record Plant. Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder, ‘I know we make our own reality and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained?’

Is there always a fork in the road and are there two preordained paths that are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that way – there’s a choice and it’s very strange sometimes.

‘Watching the Wheels’? Well, that’s like a song version of the Love Letter From John & Yoko. You know, like, ‘What have you been doing?’ ‘Well, I’ve been doing this – watching the wheels’.

I hadn’t stopped. On demand, on schedule, continuously. Walking away was hard. What it seemed like to me was that this must be what guys go through at sixty-five when suddenly they’re not supposed to exist any more and they are sent out of the office. I thought, ‘Shouldn’t I be going to the office or something? Because I don’t exist if my name isn’t in the papers or if I don’t have a record out or in the charts, if I’m not seen at the right clubs; whatever the game is’.

It must be like the guys at sixty-five when somebody comes and goes, ‘Your life is over. Time for golf!’