interestingly, for those of you who are who are have
got some musical training.
When you look at the verse sections of of this tune and the, the verse and
the chorus is, it's an interesting blend of,
of E Mixolydian and then Dorian and then Ioanian.
So, the, there's a kind of a modal mixture that occurs
in here that kind of blends three different modes together in
an interesting kind of way that doesn't really quite fit some
of the things The Beatles have done in the past, or,
or not very closely.
Of course, the big thing about this tune, the use of sitar.
George Harrison having sort of discovered the, the sitar
earlier in the year when they were filming Help.
Now, he's had some lessons and he's been working on it.
So they, they, they work out a version of the tune that uses the sitar.
In fact their are other versions you can hear them on the
Beatles anthology where there's a lot more sitar on their, on the track.
Apparently at one point it was going to be you know, very sitar
heavy but somebody said, eh, maybe we need to dial the sitar back just
a little bit, and so we have the one that everybody is used to.
Again the use of the acoustic guitar.
Which again, these are all sort of indicators of
authenticity kind of, folk music sincerity this kind of thing.
The lyrics are a song that really tells a
story about a guy who gets together with a girl.
He thinks that maybe,
they go to her apartment, he thinks that maybe
this is going to get kind romantic, romantic and sexual.
But in the end he wakes up and she's gone and nothing
ever happened overnight and so, in the end, he burns her apartment down.
Now, look, this is a pretty crazy reaction to you know a date that
didn't work out quite the right way and people are saying God this is misogynist.
Really is this the way you treat your women you know.
And so the whole time through she's, she's talking about her apartment and this
blond wood that she has through the
apartment which was very stylish at the time.
Not much furniture almost looked like it was
from a magazine saying isn't it beautiful Norwegian wood.
And at the end you know, the protagonist is essentially going
yeah, it's great wood, it burns real good, this kind of thing.
And so this, this sort of surprise ending shows,
well, aside from the fact that it's not, not the
proudest moment maybe in Beatles lyrics from that point of view.
But it shows a real attention to detail to trying to
do something with the lyrics that they haven't really quite done before.
And that's to kind of tell a story with
a tricky kind of ending in this kind of thing.
This is, this is ha, in many ways Norwegian Wood is the lyrics to
it are disputed by the guys inside the group because everybody thinks they came
up with that twist at the end.
They all want to take credit for lighting
the, lighting the Norwegian wood in the apartment.
Anyway, it shows a lot of the, of the the, the
characteristics of authenticity and the artist model that we've been following.
The second John Lennon song I want to talk about is In My Life.
I said a bit about this all, already in the previous video.
This from a form point of view is a
very interesting song because it's what I would call a
simple verse song, but the verse itself is actually very
complicated, sort of falling into kind of two large kind of sections.
But there's no chorus that really comes back.
There's a refrain at the end of the verse.
And so you just get this big, complicated verse
and then a repeat of the complicated verse, and then
a harpsichord solo through the first half of the
complicated verse, and then the second half of the complicated
verse and a tag.
So it really just sort of does that same big structure three times and then tags.
What I'm calling the harpsichord solo's not actually a harpsichord.
It's actually a piano that was recorded at half speed.
And the way these tape decks work is that when you can,
when you record something at half speed, if you play it an
octave lower and half as fast, when you speed it up it
will go up an octave to regular pitch and, you know, the tempo
will be where you want it to be.
And so you can play something that's particularly complicated half speed,
which a lot of musicians are happy to be able to do.
But play it an octave low on an instrument like a piano, and then speed it up and all
of a sudden it's absolutely perfect and you haven't
had to play it at that sort of breakneck speed.
The reason why the Beetles did this is not because George Martin couldn't play
the harpsichord part because they didn't have
a harpsichord part, harpsichord available to them.
So, by taking the piano and recording it slow and then
speeding up, they were able to give the timbre of the piano.
A kind of brittleness that makes it sound like harpsichord and a lot
of people really think of this as being a harpsichord in this piece.