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"A Day in the Life" is a song by the British rock band The Beatles, credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The song appears as the final track on their album ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band''. The song includes portions originally authored independently by Lennon and McCartney, and two cacophonous, part-improvised, orchestral crescendos
. Lennon was inspired by newspaper articles on the death of Tara Browne, and a civic plan to fill four thousand potholes in Blackburn. While recording the song, the Beatles were not certain how to fill the gap between Lennon's and McCartney's portions of the song. It was later decided that a partly-improvised crescendo by an orchestra would serve as the bridge.
The supposed drug reference in the line "I'd love to turn you on" resulted in the banning of the song by the BBC.[title=A Day in the Life] 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.
Lyrical inspiration and collaborationThere 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 after driving through a red light..[ title=BBC - Radio 2 - Sold On Song - TOP 100 - Day in the Life ] 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 & Paul were imagining a stoned politician who had stopped at a set of traffic lights.[last=Martin ]
The final verse was inspired by an article in the Daily Mail in January 1967 regarding a substantial amount of potholes in Blackburn, a city 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.[title=The Origins of "A Day in the Life"]
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."[last=Davies ]
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.[last=Henke ] 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. McCartney also provided a short, wordless vocal bridge back into Lennon's part of the song.
RecordingThe Beatles began recording the song, with a working title "In the Life of...", on January 19, 1967.[title=Recording "A Day in the Life": Take 1] 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.[title=Recording "A Day in the Life": Friday, January 20, 1967] Martin later said that editing it out would have been unfeasible in any case.[title=A Day in the Life]
The basic track for the song was refined with remixing and additional parts added at recording sessions on January 20 and February 3.
The orchestral part was recorded on February 10 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.[title=Recording "A Day in the Life":A Remarkable Session] Martin later described explaining his improvised score to the puzzled orchestra:
{{quote|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.[last=Martin]
McCartney noted that the strings were able to keep themselves in the designated time, while the trumpets were "much wilder".[title=Songwriting & Recording Database: Sgt Pepper]
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.
It was arranged for the orchestral session to be filmed by NEMS Enterprises for use in a planned television special.[title=A Day in the Life Song Details] 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.[title=Donovan Sessionography]
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.
Song structure"A Day in the Life" is in the key of G major, but, as Alan W. Pollack explains, "its true center of gravity is in the parallel minor and the Major keys of E".
The song is laid out with an instrumental beginning, followed by three verses, the orchestral bridge, a middle section, the final verse, and an orchestral outro, or conclusion. Each verse follows the same basic layout, except each has a different way of ending. The first verse, which is twenty measures, is unique in respect to the other verses in that it ends with a repetition of the F major chord progression before returning to the home key. The second verse, two measures shorter than the first, ends on the C major chord rather than repeating the F major progression. The third verse is the same as the second, except that there is one more measure (to accommodate the "I'd love to"), and the verse does not return to the home key. Instead it leads to the bridge, a 24-measure long "glissando-like sweep" starting from low E to an E octaves higher. Random cymbal crashes are interspersed near the end to "challenge your sense of meter".
An alarm clock rings, ending the bridge and beginning McCartney's middle section. While the pulse of this section remains the same, the accents suggest a tempo twice as fast as that of the initial section. The three chords in what Pollack calls the "song portion"
The final verse has the same layout as the third verse. Starr's drumming, however, retains its double-time feel from McCartney's section. This verse leads to the end, which is the same glissando as the bridge. However, after the orchestra hits its highest note, there is a measure of silence, which leads to the "ready-made cliché of a final E-major chord." The fade-out of the chord lasts over a minute, at which time the studio noise can be heard.[title=Alan W. Pollack's
]Copyright Citations
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