July 7, 2023 —– Chart #203
Hello Music Friends,
Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Chart of the Week. There are so many great Beatles songs I could never run out. Today I have another good one for you. “A Day in the Life” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as the final track of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Credited to Lennon–McCartney, the opening and closing sections of the song were mainly written by John Lennon, with Paul McCartney primarily contributing the song’s middle section. All four Beatles played a role in shaping the final arrangement of the song.
Lennon’s lyrics were mainly inspired by contemporary newspaper articles, including a report on the death of Guinness heir Tara Browne. The recording includes two passages of orchestral glissandos that were partly improvised in the avant-garde style. In the song’s middle segment, McCartney recalls his younger years, which included riding the bus, smoking, and going to class. Following the second crescendo, the song ends with one of the most famous chords in music history, played on several keyboards, that sustains for over forty seconds.
A reputed drug reference in the line “I’d love to turn you on” resulted in the song initially being banned from broadcast by the BBC. Jeff Beck, Barry Gibb, the Fall and Phish are among the artists who have covered the song. The song inspired the creation of the Deep Note, the audio trademark for the THX film company. It remains one of the most celebrated songs in music history, appearing on many lists of the greatest songs of all time, and being commonly appraised as the Beatles’ finest song.
This song is hard to cover and this group is amazing: https://youtu.be/sCbZ15JpxPg
John Lennon wrote the melody and most of the lyrics to the verses of “A Day in the Life” in mid-January 1967. Soon afterwards, he presented the song to Paul McCartney, who contributed a middle-eight section. According to Lennon, McCartney also contributed the pivotal line “I’d love to turn you on.” In a 1970 interview, Lennon discussed their collaboration on the song:
Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on “A Day in the Life” … The way we wrote a lot of the time: you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, like “I read the news today” or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. He was a bit shy about it because I think he thought it’s already a good song … So we were doing it in his room with the piano. He said “Should we do this?” “Yeah, let’s do that.”
The song is an example of the mutual inspiration that often occurred within the Lennon-McCartney partnership. As stated by Lennon in 1968, “It was a good piece of work between Paul and me. I had the ‘I read the news today’ bit, and it turned Paul on, because now and then we really turn each other on with a bit of song, and he just said ‘yeah’ – bang bang, like that.”
According to author Ian MacDonald, “A Day in the Life” was strongly informed by Lennon’s LSD-inspired revelations, in that the song “concerned ‘reality’ only to the extent that this had been revealed by LSD to be largely in the eye of the beholder”. Having long resisted Lennon and George Harrison’s insistence that he join them and Ringo Starr in trying LSD, McCartney took it for the first time in late 1966. This experience contributed to the Beatles’ willingness to experiment on Sgt. Pepper and to Lennon and McCartney returning to a level of collaboration that had been somewhat absent.
Of course this song is recorded with a room full of musicians including a full orchestra. Nevertheless, I enjoy playing it on a single acoustic guitar. Hope you do as well.
Keep Rockin’,
Stan Bradshaw