A Day In The Life

© 1967 Northern Songs. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

 

“A Day in the Life” is one of the most widely-recognized songs by The Beatles.  The song was written by John Lennon with Paul McCartney contributing the middle eight.  Initially during recording, the Beatles were uncertain about how to fill the gap between John’s and Paul’s portions of the song.  Two improvised orchestra crescendos were added to fill the gap.  This song appeared as the final track to the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

There is some dispute about the inspiration for the first verse in the song.  Some sources claim that John Lennon’s inspiration came from two newspaper articles regarding the death of Tara Browne and a civic plan to fill 4,000 potholes in Blackburn, Lancashire, England.


The supposed drug reference in the line "I'd love to turn you on" resulted in the banning of the song by the BBC. It appears on many top songs lists, and is the 26th best song on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song is considered one of the Beatles' most influential, with the final E major chord becoming popularized to the point of being clichéd in modern music.[3] It often appears in lists and polls of the most influential Beatles songs. Since its original album release, the song has also been released on single, on compilation albums, and has been performed by other artists including Neil Young, Jeff Beck and The Bee Gees. Paul McCartney has played it live four times, once at the Liverpool Sound Concert and at The Independent Concert/Kyiv,Ukraine in June 2008, once at the Quebec City's 400th anniversary in July 2008 and once at the Friendship First concert in Tel Aviv, Israel in September 2008.

Lyrical inspiration and collaboration

There is some dispute about the inspiration for the first verse. Many believe that it was written with regard to the death of Tara Browne, the 21-year-old heir to the Guinness fortune and close friend of Lennon and McCartney, who had crashed his Lotus Elan on 18 December 1966 when a Volkswagen pulled out of a side street into his path in Redcliffe Gardens, Earls Court. In numerous interviews, Lennon claimed this was the verse's prime inspiration. However, George Martin adamantly claims that it is a drug reference (as is the line "I'd love to turn you on" and other passages from the song) and while writing the lyrics John and Paul were imagining a stoned politician who had stopped at a set of traffic lights.

The final verse was inspired by an article in the Daily Mail in January 1967 regarding a substantial amount of potholes in Blackburn, a town in Lancashire. However, he had a problem with the words of the final verse, not being able to think of how to connect "Now they know how many holes it takes to" and "the Albert Hall". His friend Terry Doran suggested that they would "fill" the Albert Hall.

The description of the accident in "A Day in the Life" was not a literal description of Browne's fatal accident. Lennon said, "I didn't copy the accident. Tara didn't blow his mind out, but it was in my mind when I was writing that verse. The details of the accident in the song — not noticing traffic lights and a crowd forming at the scene — were similarly part of the fiction."

McCartney provided the middle section of the song, a short piano piece he had been working on independently, with lyrics about a commuter whose uneventful morning routine leads him to drift off into a reverie. He had written the piece as a wistful recollection of his younger years, which included riding the bus to school, smoking and going to class. The line "I'd love to turn you on" was also contributed by McCartney, which serves as a chorus to the first section of the song. Lennon commented on McCartney's section, saying, "I had the bulk of the song and the words, but he contributed this little lick floating around in his head that he couldn't use for anything. I thought it was a damn good piece of work."

Recording

The Beatles began recording the song, with a working title "In the Life of...", on 19 January 1967, in the innovative and creative studio atmosphere ushered in by the recording of Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane over the preceding weeks.  The two sections of the song are separated by a 24-bar bridge. At first, The Beatles were not sure how to fill this transition. Thus, at the conclusion of the recording session for the basic tracks, this section solely consisted of a simple repeated piano chord and the voice of assistant Mal Evans counting the bars. Evans's guide vocal was treated with gradually increasing amounts of echo.

The 24-bar bridge section ended with the sound of an alarm clock triggered by Evans. The original intent was to edit out the ringing alarm clock when the missing section was filled in; however it complemented McCartney's piece well; the first line of McCartney's song began "Woke up, fell out of bed", so the decision was made to keep the sound. Martin later said that editing it out would have been unfeasible in any case.

The basic track for the song was refined with remixing and additional parts added at recording sessions on January 20 and February 3. Still, there was no solution for the missing 24-bar middle section of the song, when McCartney had the idea of bringing in a full orchestra to fill the gap. To allay concerns that classically-trained musicians would not be able to improvise the section, producer George Martin wrote a loose score for the section. It was an extended, atonal crescendo that encouraged the musicians to improvise within the defined framework.

The orchestral part was recorded on 10 February 1967, with McCartney and Martin conducting a 40-piece orchestra. The recording session was completed at a total cost of £367 for the players, an extravagance at the time. Martin later described explaining his improvised score to the puzzled orchestra:

    What I did there was to write ... the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra. At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note...near a chord of E major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar ... Of course, they all looked at me as though I were completely mad.

McCartney noted that the strings were able to keep themselves in the designated time, while the trumpets were "much wilder".

McCartney had originally wanted a 90-piece orchestra, but this proved impossible; the difference was made up, as the semi-improvised segment was recorded multiple times and eventually four different recordings were overdubbed into a single massive crescendo. The results were successful; in the final edit of the song, the orchestral bridge is reprised after the final verse.

It was arranged for the orchestral session to be filmed by NEMS Enterprises for use in a planned television special. The film was never released in its entirety, although portions of it can be seen in the "A Day in the Life" promotional film, which includes shots of studio guests Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Donovan, Pattie Boyd and Michael Nesmith.

Reflecting The Beatles' taste for experimentation and the avant garde at this point in their careers, the orchestra players were asked to wear or were given a costume piece on top of their formal dress. This resulted in different players wearing anything from red noses to fake stick-on nipples. Martin recalled that the lead violinist performed wearing a gorilla paw, while a bassoon player placed a balloon on the end of his instrument.

The final chord

Following the final orchestral crescendo, the song ends with one of the most famous final chords in music history. Lennon, McCartney, Starr, and Evans shared three different pianos and all played an E-major chord simultaneously. The sound of the final chord was manipulated to ring out for nearly a minute by increasing the tape sound level as the vibration faded out. The chord rings out approximately forty-two seconds. Near the end of the chord the recording levels were turned so high that listeners can hear the sounds of the studio, including rustling papers and a squeaking chair.

The piano chord was a replacement for a failed vocal experiment. On the evening following the orchestra recording session, the four Beatles had originally recorded an ending of their voices humming the chord. After multiple overdubs they found that they wanted something with more impact.

Due to the multiple takes required to perfect the orchestral cacophony and the final chord, as well as their considerable procrastination in composing the song, the total duration of time spent recording "A Day in the Life" was 34 hours. In contrast, the Beatles' earliest work, their first album Please Please Me, was recorded in its entirety in only 10 hours. The Anthology 3 version of "The End" concludes with the final chord of "A Day in the Life" to bring closure to the CD series.