How the Beatles Wrote ‘A Day in the Life’

There much more stories about how they wrote it. Eg. the story about the orchestra. They booked the strings for a few days, but only had an idea of the downgoing glissando. He explained it to them, but they just stared. What does he mean? Which tones? So he took some empty note sheets, marked the beginning and the end and then drew a straight line from the top left to the bottom right, which was not easy because it spanned multiple lines. Now they got it. And they could play it now easily.

Also the Andy Warhol story. He made a painting of the crashed Lotus, the one they saw in the newspaper. I saw it live in my hometown's Warhol exhibition. This was quite a moment. Not even the curator knew about "A Day in the life" but it was so obvious.

One of my favorite things about this song is the way it was originally placed on the record. There's the huge piano chord, then silence, then a high pitched sound allegedly to mess with people's dogs, and then a second or two of gibberish speech that endlessly loops around the inner circle of the record.

Digital media plays that gibberish for a few seconds and then fades out, which is a different experience from the original record which would play it until you actually stopped the record.

It reminds me of how the move from CRT to LCD televisions broke the NES light gun, and makes me wonder what other edge cases we're unknowingly changing or disabling with current technology upgrades.

For a more musical deconstruction, check out Scott Freiman's video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTBB6iQbTsE

It's also worth noting how heavily the whole Sgt. Pepper is influenced by Freak Out! by Frank Zappa. That record basically singlehandedly started the psychedelic revolution in rock. If you don't know it go listen to it!

That last E chord never fails to send shivers down my spine.

Is the major chord heard when a Mac boots up a reference to "A Day in the Life"?

Also-- there's a complete transcription of the Beatles output published by Hal Leonard. For the orchestral gliss from "A Day in the Life" there is an ascending line drawn on a single staff, and the staff is titled "orchestra". I thought that was pretty funny.

he's right it is not there best album, which is indeed rubber soul or revolver, however when Lennon sings 'she was just 17, you know what I mean", I've got a pretty damn good idea what he was on about...

Great article. Great story.

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