A Day in the Life
"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.
This article is about the song. For other uses, see A Day in the Life (disambiguation)."A Day in the Life"
26 May 1967[1]
19–20 January and 3, 10 & 22 February 1967
EMI, London
5:35
- Parlophone (UK)
- Capitol (US)
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 popular 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 influential and celebrated songs in popular music history, appearing on many lists of the greatest songs of all time, and being commonly appraised as the Beatles' finest song.
Lyrics[edit]
Tara Browne[edit]
Music critic Tim Riley says that in "A Day in the Life", Lennon uses the same lyrical device introduced in "Strawberry Fields Forever", whereby free-form lyrics allow a greater freedom of expression and create a "supernatural calm".[12] According to Lennon, the inspiration for the first two verses was the death of Tara Browne, the 21-year-old heir to the Guinness fortune who had crashed his car on 18 December 1966. Browne was a friend of Lennon and McCartney,[13] and had instigated McCartney's first experience with LSD.[14] Lennon adapted the song's verse lyrics from a story in the 17 January 1967 edition of the Daily Mail,[15] which reported the ruling on a custody action over Browne's two young children.
During a writing session at McCartney's house in north London, Lennon and McCartney fine-tuned the lyrics, using an approach that author Howard Sounes likens to the cut-up technique popularised by William S. Burroughs.[16] "I didn't copy the accident," Lennon said. "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."[17] In 1997, McCartney expounded on the subject: "The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together. It has been attributed to Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, which I don't believe is the case, certainly as we were writing it, I was not attributing it to Tara in my head. In John's head it might have been. In my head I was imagining a politician bombed out on drugs who'd stopped at some traffic lights and didn't notice that the lights had changed. The 'blew his mind' was purely a drugs reference, nothing to do with a car crash."[18] But in 2021, McCartney recalled the inspiration for this part of the composition as follows: "That was around this same time, when I was twenty-something and going out on the moped from my dad's house to Betty's house. I was taking a friend, Tara Guinness. He died later in a car accident. He was a nice boy. I wrote about him in 'A Day in the Life': 'He blew his mind out in a car / He didn't notice that the lights had changed'."[19]
"4,000 holes"[edit]
Lennon wrote the song's final verse inspired by a Far & Near news brief, in the same 17 January edition of the Daily Mail that had inspired the first two verses.[20] Under the headline "The holes in our roads", the brief stated: "There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey. If Blackburn is typical, there are two million holes in Britain's roads and 300,000 in London."[21]
Musical structure and development[edit]
Basic track[edit]
The Beatles began recording the song, with a working title of "In the Life of ...", at EMI's Studio Two on 19 January 1967.[34] The line-up as they rehearsed the track was Lennon on piano, McCartney on Hammond organ, Harrison on acoustic guitar, and Starr on congas.[35] The band then taped four takes of the rhythm track, by which point Lennon had switched to acoustic guitar and McCartney to piano, with Harrison now playing maracas.[35][36]
As a link between the end of the second verse and the start of McCartney's middle-eight, the band included a 24-bar bridge.[37] At first, the Beatles were not sure how to fill this link section.[38] At the conclusion of the session on 19 January, the transition consisted of a simple repeated piano chord and the voice of assistant Mal Evans counting out the bars. Evans' voice was treated with gradually increasing amounts of echo. The 24-bar bridge ended with the sound of an alarm clock triggered by Evans. Although the original intent was to edit out the ringing alarm clock when the section was filled in, it complemented McCartney's piece – which begins with the line "Woke up, fell out of bed" – so the decision was made to keep the sound.[39][nb 3] A second transition follows McCartney's final line of the middle eight ("I went into a dream") consisting of vocalised "aah"s that link to the song's final verse. (Accounts differ as to which of the Beatles sang it.)[40][41][42][43]
The track was refined with remixing and additional parts added on 20 January and 3 February.[39][44] During the latter session, McCartney and Starr re-recorded their contributions on bass guitar and drums, respectively.[45] Starr later highlighted his fills on the song as typical of an approach whereby "I try to become an instrument; play the mood of the song. For example, 'Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,' – boom ba bom. I try to show that; the disenchanting mood."[46] As on the 1966 track "Rain", music journalist Ben Edmonds recognises Starr's playing as reflective of his empathy with Lennon's songwriting. In Edmonds' description, the drumming on "A Day in the Life" "embod[ies] psychedelic drift – mysterious, surprising, without losing sight of its rhythmic role".[47]
Variations[edit]
On the Sgt. Pepper album, the start of "A Day in the Life" is cross-faded with the applause at the end of the previous track, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)". On the Beatles' 1967–1970 compilation LP, the crossfade is cut off, and the track begins abruptly after the start of the original recording, but on the soundtrack album Imagine: John Lennon and the CD versions of 1967–1970, the song starts cleanly, with no applause effects.[80][81][82]
The Anthology 2 album, released in 1996, featured a composite remix of "A Day in the Life", including elements from the first two takes, representing the song at its early, pre-orchestral stage,[83] while Anthology 3, the last in a trilogy of albums with Anthology 1 and Anthology 2, all of which tie in with the televised special The Beatles Anthology, included a version of "The End", the last track of the album that signifies the end of The Beatles Anthology by having the last note fade into the final chord of "A Day in the Life" (reversed, then played forwards).[84] The version on the 2006 soundtrack remix album Love has the song starting with Lennon's intro of "sugar plum fairy", with the strings being more prominent during the crescendos.[35] In 2017, a handful of outtakes from the recording sessions, including the first take, were included on the two-disc and six-disc versions of the 50th-anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper.[83] The six-disc version of that edition also included, on a disc of mono mixes, a previously unreleased early demo mix of the song in its pre-orchestral stage, as of 30 January.[85]
BBC radio ban[edit]
The song became controversial for its supposed references to drugs. On 20 May 1967, during the BBC Light Programme's preview of the Sgt. Pepper album, disc jockey Kenny Everett was prevented from playing "A Day in the Life".[86] The BBC announced that it would not broadcast the song due to the line "I'd love to turn you on", which, according to the corporation, advocated drug use.[13][87] Other lyrics allegedly referring to drugs include "found my way upstairs and had a smoke / somebody spoke and I went into a dream". A spokesman for the BBC stated: "We have listened to this song over and over again. And we have decided that it appears to go just a little too far, and could encourage a permissive attitude to drug-taking."[88][nb 7]
At the time, Lennon and McCartney denied that there were drug references in "A Day in the Life" and publicly complained about the ban at a dinner party at the home of their manager, Brian Epstein, celebrating their album's release. Lennon said that the song was simply about "a crash and its victim", and called the line in question "the most innocent of phrases".[88] McCartney later said: "This was the only one in the album written as a deliberate provocation. A stick-that-in-your-pipe ... But what we want is to turn you on to the truth rather than pot."[90] The Beatles nevertheless aligned themselves with the drug culture in Britain by paying for (at McCartney's instigation) a full-page advertisement in The Times, in which, along with 60 other signatories, they and Epstein denounced the law against marijuana as "immoral in principle and unworkable in practice".[91] In addition, on 19 June, McCartney confirmed to an ITN reporter, further to his statement in a recent Life magazine interview, that he had taken LSD.[92] Described by MacDonald as a "careless admission", it led to condemnation of McCartney in the British press, recalling the outcry caused by the publication of Lennon's "More popular than Jesus" remark in the US in 1966.[93][94] The BBC ban on the song was eventually lifted on 13 March 1972.[95][nb 8]
Recognition and reception[edit]
Recalling the release of Sgt. Pepper in his 1977 book The Beatles Forever, Nicholas Schaffner wrote that "Nothing quite like 'A Day in the Life' had been attempted before in so-called popular music" in terms of the song's "use of dynamics and tricks of rhythm, and of space and stereo effect, and its deft intermingling of scenes from dream, reality, and shades in between". Schaffner said that in the context of 1967, the track "was so visually evocative it seemed more like a film than a mere song. Except that the pictures were all in our heads."[97] Having been given a tape of "A Day in the Life" by Harrison before leaving London, David Crosby proselytised strongly about Sgt. Pepper to his circle in Los Angeles,[98] sharing the recording with his Byrds bandmates and Graham Nash.[99] Crosby later expressed surprise that by 1970 the album's powerful sentiments had not been enough to stop the Vietnam War.[100]
Richard Goldstein of The New York Times called the song "a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric" and said that it "stands as one of the most important Lennon–McCartney compositions … [and] an historic Pop event".[101][102] In his praise for the track, he drew comparisons between its lyrics and the work of T. S. Eliot and likened its music to Wagner.[103] In a contemporary music critics' poll published by Jazz & Pop magazine, "A Day in the Life" won in the categories of Best Pop Song and Best Pop Arrangement.[104]
In his appraisal of the song, musicologist Walter Everett states that, as on the band's Revolver album, "the most monumental piece on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was Lennon's". He identifies the track's most striking feature as "its mysterious and poetic approach to serious topics that come together in a larger, direct message to its listeners, an embodiment of the central ideal for which the Beatles stood: that a truly meaningful life can be had only when one is aware of one's self and one's surroundings and overcomes the status quo."[105] Beatles biographer Philip Norman describes "A Day in the Life" as a "masterpiece" and cites it as an example of how Sgt. Pepper "certainly was John's Freak Out!", referring to the 1966 album by the Mothers of Invention.[106] As the closing track on Sgt. Pepper, the song was the object of intense scrutiny and commentary. In Ian MacDonald's description, it has been interpreted "as a sober return to the real world after the drunken fantasy of 'Pepperland'; as a conceptual statement about the structure of the pop album (or the artifice of the studio, or the falsity of recorded performance); as an evocation of a bad [LSD] trip; as a 'pop Waste Land'; even as a morbid celebration of death".[10][nb 9]
"A Day in the Life" became one of the Beatles' most influential songs, and many now consider it to be the band's greatest work. Paul Grushkin, in his book Rockin' Down the Highway: The Cars and People That Made Rock Roll, called the track "one of the most ambitious, influential, and groundbreaking works in pop music history".[107] According to musicologist John Covach, "'A Day in the Life' is perhaps one of the most important single tracks in the history of rock music; clocking in at only four minutes and forty-five seconds, it must surely be among the shortest epic pieces in rock."[108] In his review of the 50th anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper for Rolling Stone, Mikal Gilmore says that "A Day in the Life" and Harrison's "Within You Without You" are the only songs on the album that transcend its legacy as "a gestalt: a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts".[109] In a 2017 article for Newsweek, Tim de Lisle cited Chris Smith's recollection of him and fellow art student Freddie Mercury "writ[ing] little bits of songs which we linked together, like 'A Day in the Life'", as evidence to show that "No Pepper, no 'Bohemian Rhapsody'."[110]
James A. Moorer has said that both "A Day in the Life" and a fugue in B minor by Bach were his sources of inspiration for Deep Note, the audio trademark he created for the THX film company.[111] The song's final chord inspired Apple sound designer Jim Reekes in creating the start-up chime of the Apple Macintosh featured on Macintosh Quadra computers. Reekes said he used "a C Major chord, played with both hands stretched out as wide as possible", played on a Korg Wavestation EX.[112]
"A Day in the Life" appears on many top songs lists. It placed twelfth on CBC's 50 Tracks, the second highest Beatles song on the list after "In My Life".[113] It placed first in Q magazine's list of the 50 greatest British songs of all time, and was at the top of Mojo's 101 Greatest Beatles' Songs, as decided by a panel of musicians and journalists.[114][115][116] "A Day in the Life" was also nominated for a Grammy in 1967 for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist or Instrumentalist.[117] In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked it at number 26 on the magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time", number 28 on a revised list in 2011,[118] number 24 on a revised list on 2021,[119] and in 2010, deemed it to be the Beatles' greatest song.[28] It is listed at number 5 on Pitchfork's list of "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s".[120]