Tomorrow Never Knows

2005-07-17

Some songs just stay with you. No matter what you do you can’t shake them. You find yourself singing them at the strangest times. “Tomorrow Never Knows” is one of those songs for me.

I was having dinner a couple of night ago here in L.A. with my friend Jeff (who also works in the music business managing the interests of The Doors) and we got on to the topic of The Beatles. I can’t remember what started the conversation, but the end result was that we both agreed Revolver was probably our favorite Beatles album.

I had stronger feelings for Sgt. Pepper’s than Jeff. For him the album stood up solidly as an entire piece of art, but he felt the tracks needed each other and didn’t work as well pulled apart from the whole. For me, it’s hard to knock Sgt. Pepper’s in any way, and I disagreed with him stating that I could listen to the album in its normal sequence or with the songs pulled out one by one in any order.

As a tangential note, for many years I’ve heard some people refer to Sgt. Pepper’s as a concept album. I’m not sure what the underlying thread is that ties all the tracks together – the essential element in my mind required for something to be a concept album (see Tommy or Quadrophenia) – and I’m not really asking for anyone to tell me the answer as I don’t believe there is one.

Where I did agree with Jeff is that Revolver is an album that is not only perfect from first song to last, but every track on the album stands up on its own.

As an album it’s like an All-Star line up of the greatest Yankees team ever, it’s hard to pick a favorite song with so many brilliant ones to choose from, but for me it’s “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a song that interestingly enough among all the gems surrounding it, is probably the least singable or hummable. The power of this song is in its production and in the feeling it gives me as the listener.

Like a painting or film masterpiece you see new things in every time you view it, “Tomorrow Never Knows” is one of those songs I can listen to over and over again (and I do) occasionally discovering nuances that were previously hidden. The textures are so rich, and the melody so simple. I can only imagine what it must have sounded like in the recording studio when it was being created.

I can’t think of a song that came before that sounding anything like it; it’s truly a singular composition, with a production that was probably more responsible for elevating studio creativity to another level than anything before it. Yes, Phil Spector was brilliant, so was Brian Wilson, but neither did anything like this. By the way, that’s my opinion, so no need to tell me I’m wrong.

It was when the evening’s conversation landed on “Tomorrow Never Knows” that Jeff and I were most in sync. Neither of us could nail down exactly what it was about this song that made it our mutual favorite on the album, but we both agreed that this was the star of Revolver, as well as one of the greatest songs ever recorded.