Song of the day for May 30, 2024
Revolution 9 by the Beatles is today’s featured song.
On this day in 1968, The Beatles entered London’s EMI Studios to begin work on their 30-track self-titled masterpiece (popularly referred to as The White Album, due to its all-white jacket design). The band had recently returned from a trip to India, where they studied Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and wrote 19 of the songs that would end up on the album. Sessions would last six months, beginning with the track “Revolution,” while the resulting double album was released to broad acclaim and commercial success around the world. Today, The White Album ranks among one of the greatest LPs of all time.
This song is considered one of the weirdest songs the Beatles ever recorded. It is 8:22 of pure chaos.
John Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. The composition was influenced by the avant-garde style of Yoko Ono as well as the musique concrète works of composers such as Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
The recording began as an extended ending to the album version of Lennon’s song “Revolution”. Lennon, Harrison and Ono then combined the unused coda with numerous overdubbed vocals, speech, sound effects, and short tape loops of speech and musical performances, some of which were reversed. These were further manipulated with echo, distortion, stereo panning, and fading. At eight minutes and twenty-two seconds, it is the longest track that the Beatles officially released while together as a band.
