Mellow Yellow (album) previously illustrated his infatuation with an ability to define the mid-sixties pop music scene. On "Mellow Yellow" this is still evident in "Sunny South Kensington", "Museum" (originally recorded for the "Sunshine Superman album" and rerecorded for "Mellow Yellow") and the title track, but is also tempered with world-weary observations of that scene ("Young Girl Blues"). The contractual problems that prevented the release of Donovan's music in the UK led him to write such songs as the resigned "Writer in the Sun", where he contemplates the possibility of his own forced retirement from the music industry at the age of 20.
Yellow Submarine (song) intended as a nonsense song for children, "Yellow Submarine" received various social and political interpretations at the time; music journalist Peter Doggett wrote that the "culturally empty" song "became a kind of Rorschach test for radical minds." The song's chorus was reappropriated by schoolchildren, sports fans, and striking workers in their own chants. At a Mobe protest in San Francisco, a yellow papier-mâché submarine made its way through the crowd, which "Time" magazine interpreted as a "symbol of the psychedelic set's desire for escape". A reviewer for the "P.O. Frisco" wrote in 1966, "the Yellow Submarine may suggest, in the