The World’s Greatest Song That Simply Shouldn’t Exist: The Making of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”

Were we to take bets on the sin­gle most wide­ly heard alarm clock, the one includ­ed on the Bea­t­les’ “A Day in the Life” would sure­ly be a pop­u­lar choice. It comes, you’ll recall, at the begin­ning of the song’s mid­dle sec­tion, when Paul takes over from John and sings about wak­ing up, comb­ing his hair, catch­ing a bus, and hav­ing a smoke. Giv­en the lyrics’ sub­ject mat­ter, its inclu­sion seems nat­ur­al, and even like one of the most straight­for­ward­ly explic­a­ble choic­es in the entire record­ing. In fact, the alarm clock was nev­er meant to stay in the mix: the band’s assis­tant Mal Evans set it off as a gag after doing a place­hold­er count of 24 mea­sures in the mid­dle of the ses­sions, but it just hap­pened to work per­fect­ly with the form the song even­tu­al­ly took.

That’s just one of the for­tu­itous acci­dents music YouTu­ber David Hart­ley recounts in the video above, on the com­plete mak­ing of “A Day in the Life.” As most Bea­t­les fans know, John real­ly did take his ini­tial inspi­ra­tion from the news­pa­per, and in par­tic­u­lar a cou­ple of arti­cles about a Guin­ness heir’s fatal car crash and 4,000 holes in Black­burn, Lan­cashire.

But after he wrote his vers­es, he found him­self at a loss as to how to devel­op the song from there. Paul offered the bit he’d already writ­ten about falling out of bed and drag­ging a comb across his head. It was­n’t long before the Bea­t­les began record­ing — and doing so for the first time, Hart­ley notes, before hav­ing fin­ished writ­ing the song. They had dis­parate pieces of music to join togeth­er, but no idea, yet, of how they’d do it.

Hence those 24 emp­ty bars. Play­ing a series of ear­ly takes, Hart­ley shows how they got to be filled in, draw­ing heav­i­ly on Here, There, and Every­where: My Life Record­ing the Music of the Bea­t­les, the mem­oir of engi­neer Geoff Emer­ick. John’s idea of “a sound that began real­ly small, and then grad­u­al­ly expand­ed into some­thing huge” inspired Paul’s sug­ges­tion of a sym­pho­ny orches­tra, in response to which pro­duc­er George Mar­tin expressed con­cerns about the cost of hir­ing one. Ringo, in turn, jok­ing­ly pro­posed hir­ing half the orches­tra and hav­ing them play the part twice, which turned out to be a prag­mat­ic solu­tion. As for how to end a song like this, the use of “maybe the most famous sin­gle chord in record­ed his­to­ry” — fol­lowed by “a high-fre­quen­cy tone only dogs could hear and a short loop of non­sense sound” — came as the result of a process we can only call Beat­lesque.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How John Lennon Wrote the Bea­t­les’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”