PENNY LANE
(John Lennon/Paul McCartney)
Recorded 29, 30 December 1966, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 17 January 1967.
“‘Penny Lane / Strawberry Field Forever’ was the best record we ever made” reckoned Beatles producer George Martin.
McCartney nostalgic ‘Penny Lane’ didn’t have the psychic tension of Lennon’s ‘Strawberry Fields’, but it was every bit as imaginative and lyrical. No other single displays the complemantary talents of the Lennon/McCartney pairing so well.
While John’s song was locked in the mind, Paul’s roamed the streets of Liverpool with a smile on its face. The music matched that sense of freedom, with the crowning touch supplied by David Mason’s piccolo trumpet solo. A closing Mason flourish was removed from the song in the final mix had been sent to the States, for use on promo copies of the single.
TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS
(John Lennon/Paul McCartney)
Recorded 6, 7, 12 April 1966
Almost five months after the Beatles added their final vocals to the charming ‘I’m looking through you’, they were back in the studio - to create three minutes of turmoil that envisaged the death of the concious mind and the the triumph beyond death of the universal spirit. What had happened between November 1965 and April 1966? John Lennon had been on a dual voyage of discovery - experimenting with the hallucogenic powers of LSD, and finding that it was possible to match the chaotic visions he saw on his chemically-fuelled trips with collages of sound.
Both Lennon and McCartney began creating mind movies at their home studios, extended webs of noice that were based around tape loops and ‘found sounds’. McCartney was the pioneer in this regard, and it was he who supervised the addition of the almost supernatural squawks and howls that punctuated the song. But the concept was Lennon’s, taken from his reading of ‘The Tibetan Book Of The Dead’. Like Harrison, Lennon noted the similarity between the imagery of Eastern spirituality, and the beyond-conciousness experiences of the acid trips. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, with its eerie ‘treated’ vocal, droning drums and terrifying soundscape, was the ultimate expression of his discovery - and of the enormous change in The Beatles since they’d finished ‘Rubber Soul’.
We boys don’t get butterflies, we get fireworks. We don’t have you on our mind 24/7, but we do have you on our hearts. Often, yes we wait for you to go online, sometimes simply even just being online makes our heart skip a beat, even if we don’t talk. Whenever you talk to us, our face forms that half-smile; it means we are happy but are trying our hardest to not show it, and fail at hiding it. We do miss you all the time; granted, we’d spend all our time with you if possible. We don’t think of the smallest things you say, we think of every word you say, panicking at every single word, trying to define what it really means, to read between the lines. But wait there’s more.
We would love you in a million ways. And once we start loving you there is no going back for us. No matter how hard we try we will always love a girl that has touched us. Us boys when in love will think of that girl first thing in the morning, and think of that girl last before we sleep at night. Whenever we see a couple, our thoughts immediately jump to that girl, and imagine that the couple was us. Every single detail about her is loved; the way she walks, talks, speaks. The sound of her voice. Her laughter. The sparkle in her eyes. Her shy smile. The way she dresses. That cute face she makes when she’s asleep. And the way she says our name that our hearts just explode with mirth, a simple act that no-one else can replicate.
A boy in love with a girl is no simple thing, though ladies stereotype us guys as simple. A man in love is not simple. No. He will be unpredictable. He will be persistent, stubborn, and given the circumstances, if it means carrying you from one side of the world to the other to win your heart, a man in love would. He will be a martyr, giving his all and asking for almost none. He will show you how to appreciate the beauty of the world in a thousand ways, and then he will tell you how much he appreciates your beauty in a million ways.
A man in love is no simple thing.
(via leilockheart)
Under the bridge
