Strawberry Fields Forever

The Beatles are so omnipresent that it’s easy to take them for granted. I answered a question on r/musictheory about that weird chord in the chorus of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and it made me remember that the song exists, that it’s super cool, and that it would be an interesting topic both for my music tech and songwriting students. 

This song was famously assembled in the studio from multiple takes, and its production is quite complicated. Like many later Beatles psychedelic masterpieces, this ended up being more a piece of electronic music than rock. But before we get into the production of the track, let’s talk about the “notes on the page” aspect of the song. John Lennon is very good at making unconventional songwriting ideas sound intuitive and inevitable.

“Strawberry Fields Forever” is between the keys of A and B-flat, for reasons I’ll get into below. However, the take that makes up most of the finished track was originally recorded in C, so that’s the key I used for my chart. 

The intro, played on Mellotron flute, was written by Paul McCartney. It seems to start in G, but ends up in C. The song proper begins with the chorus, continuing the C chord from the end of the intro. The second chord is Gm, seemingly out of nowhere. So maybe we’re in G Dorian? The third chord is even more unexpected, an A7. Lennon sings B-flat on top of it, making it effectively an A7(b9). In the later choruses, George Martin’s string arrangement implies Edim7. You would expect this chord to resolve to Dm, but Lennon instead resolves it to F. Then it goes back to A7, then back to F! This is the bar where he sings “Strawberry fields”. You could think of it as a bar of 2/4 sung in quarter note triplets but I prefer to think of it as a bar of 6/8.

The verse starts with a lovely bit of oblique motion: the melody repeats the note D in triplets while the bassline descends chromatically in straight quarter notes. So hip! The harmony and form are conventional during the verse, which makes a nice contrast to the mysterious and asymmetrical chorus. The verse melody is almost classical-sounding in its formality, though it’s easy to forget that when you’re listening to Lennon’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics.

Okay, but interesting though the song itself is, the real magic is in its production, its instantly recognizable soundscape. When you read about the production of this track, they always talk about how it was spliced together from takes at two different tempos in two different keys. But it’s surprisingly difficult to figure out what keys those takes were in originally. Marc Lewisohn’s book about the Beatles’ recording sessions goes into a lot of detail about the production process, but he isn’t much help on the musical content. So I did some musicological detective work of my own. Somebody helpfully collected every single take and mixdown. Hooray for internet bootleggers!

Here’s an early (very rough) demo that John Lennon recorded. It’s in B-flat. That’s not a very guitar-friendly key. I wonder if Lennon was playing in A with a capo, or his guitar was tuned sharp? Before digital tuners, guitarists usually tended to just tune the guitar to itself, and it was easy for the pitch to drift.

Here are two later demos. One is in B-flat, and the other is C-sharp. Were these played in A and C with a capo, or with the guitar tuned sharp?

Here’s the first take that the Beatles recorded at Abbey Road. It’s in B. The timbre has that sped-up quality, which makes me think it was probably originally recorded in A. There’s a partial rehearsal take that’s in A, which supports my theory.

Take 4 is in B-flat. On this take, the instruments sound like they were slowed down, most likely from C. However, Lennon’s voice doesn’t sound vari-speeded at all. Maybe it was overdubbed at normal speed onto the slowed down track.

The first minute of the final master comes from take 7, which is in B-flat. This was clearly slowed down, but from what starting pitch? Various sources say that it was originally in B, but I wonder if it wasn’t recorded in the much more keyboard-friendly key of C. 

Take 24 (not on YouTube) includes the heavy drums and accompanying percussion that they ended up splicing into the song’s coda, and includes Lennon saying “calm down, Ringo” and “cranberry sauce.”

Most of the finished track comes from take 26, which has the strings and horns and is much faster than previous versions. As I said above, this take was definitely recorded in C.

Take 26 includes a backwards hi-hat part that must have been very labor-intensive to record. Nevertheless, they were right to remove it from the final mix. You can faintly hear the backwards hats in the background on the final version, especially on the remaster from 2009.

After listening to mixed-down acetates, Lennon said he liked take 26, but that he preferred the beginning of take 7. He asked George Martin to edit them together. Martin famously complained that they were in different keys and different tempos, and Lennon calmly told him that he could make it work. Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick had to slow take 26 way down to match the pitch of take 7, lowering its pitch a whole step plus a quarter tone. The edit point comes exactly at 0:59 of the released version, on the word “going”. (You can tell because that’s where the cellos enter.) Take 7 didn’t have a chorus after the first verse, so Emerick spliced in the first measure and a half of a later chorus from take 7.

Miscellaneous fun facts:

• George Harrison played the “slide guitar” on the Mellotron’s guitar patch, and did the slides with the pitch control knob. The stuttery “morse code” sound is Mellotron too.
• George also plays the swarmandel, the plucked string instrument at the end of the second and third choruses and on the outtro. Critics talk about how the lead guitar part on the outtro has a sitar-like quality, which is a George Harrison trademark, but it was played by Paul McCartney.
• George Martin said that he came up with the idea of the premature fadeout to hide the awkward entrance of the heavy drums from take 24.

This song had a massive cultural afterlife, but while it has frequently been imitated and referenced, few people have attempted to cover it. That’s understandable; it’s impossible to do a faithful recreation live, so you’d have to come up with a whole different arrangement, and it’s hard to imagine the song in any setting but the Beatles’. I’ve never heard a really compelling cover. Candy Flip did theirs over the Funky Drummer break, I guess that’s mildly interesting.

There would seem to be more potential for sampling and remixing this song than covering it, but it’s a prohibitively expensive sample clearance. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, though. Jay Electronica and Mac Miller flip the Mellotron intro for the amazingly titled “Suplexes Inside of Complexes and Duplexes.”

The official remix from Beatles Love includes samples of several other Beatles songs. 

This is fine, but it’s very tame compared to the wild sonic experimentation of the original. I hope someday they just put all the multitracks out there and encourage everyone to go crazy with them. I have had a lot of fun remixing the Beatles, and I wish more people could feel empowered to give it a try.

Update: folks on Twitter recommended listening to this podcast episode about the song, which gets deep into the string and horn arrangement and is super interesting.