Personnel:
Brad McKnight Wilson: Acoustic Guitar, Lead Vocals
Cliff Wilson: Cello, Electric Guitar, Bass, Piano, Choir Vocals
Cliff Hochberg: Drum Kit, Bongos, Finger Cymbals, Shaker
Tom Spain: Tuba
Maeli Goren: Choir Vocals
Hannah Wilson Rebrovick: Choir Vocals
Joe Rebrovick: Choir Vocals
Why this song is on the album:
This was Brad’s choice, and we co-produced it. It’s the most ambitious piece in the collection.
Performance notes:
Brad had worked out the basic approach to the verses before coming into the studio, and I added the cello in verse two to introduce the Beatles’ original bass line, which was absent in the guitar-only accompaniment.
My favorite moment on the entire album is when the “band” enters unexpectedly with a huge chord near the end of the third verse – “having read the book” – foreshadowed by the doubled vocal on that lyric. It’s one of the few places where we play a different chord than the Beatles played, and I decided to really lean into it. Cliff Hochberg added some very nice percussion elements to that moment.
And then we are into “the build” – the section of the song where the Beatles had a symphony orchestra improvise from soft and low to high and loud over 24 bars, ending on an E major chord to lead into McCartney’s bridge. We did not have a symphony orchestra at our disposal, so we used guitars, celli, percussion, voices and tuba – Tom Spain having already been in the studio to record his part for When I’m 64.
The vocal gibberish in the build is chanting played backward – inspired by the (false) rumor that the Beatles had “backmasked” the message “Paul is a dead man” on the White Album. Since it was going to be played backwards, I had to start loud and end quiet, and emphasize beats 2 and 4 rather than 1 and 3. The chanting consists of two different phrases; I won’t spoil the fun by telling you what they are. E-mail me if you really want to know.
The build ends with the first of two “bridges.” For McCartney’s bridge (“Woke up. Got out of bed…”) we decided to try a hard rock style and were pleased with how that worked. We altered a couple of chords to suit the musical style. This section ends with the lyric “Somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” segueing into Lennon’s trippy bridge.
For the musical portion of this bridge, we went with an a cappella church choir – Hannah and Maeli each singing both the soprano and alto parts, Brad and I singing tenor, and Joe and I singing bass. The melody, chords and lack of lyrics (“Ah……”) are all straight from Lennon’s version.
The church choir proved a nice, rather ironic background for the sound-bite montage. In an earlier mix, the montage was all Black Lives Matter material, which was quite powerful. But in the end we decided to go with a broader range of content to dramatize the full intensity of this historical moment. I read the news today – Oh boy! It incorporates both BLM and Covid-19 related quotes, as well as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s voice reminding us of her principled dissents.
The speakers in the montage are:
- Susan Ormiston, Senior Correspondent, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News
- Ruth Bader Ginsberg (1933-2020), former Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
- Valerie Castile, mother of Philando Castile, killed by police in Minneapolis in 2016
- Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director, National Institutes of Health
- Coco Gauf, tennis star, at a BLM protest
- Nate Silver, founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight
- Anthony Almojera, New York City Emergency Services
- Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), former Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
- Jamie Foxx, actor, leading a BLM chant
There follows a five-note transitional phrase that takes us back from the bridge to the final verse. (DAAA, da DAAA, da DA) In the Beatles’ version this is a bold statement from the low brass. We instead did a rather delicate guitar and pizzicato cello rendition of the same notes. This gets a bit lost in the fadeout of the BLM chant. It’s something I spent some time on that didn’t really matter much in the end.
And then we are back with the final verse, just guitar and voice, same as at the start. Instead of a second large build, we did an anti-build – we kept the tonality, but it is very restrained leading into the final chord.
The final chord of the Beatles’ recording is a giant E Major chord played on two pianos and a harmonium and sustained for 42 seconds, stretching the limits of audio engineering. That chord is one of the two most famous chords in their canon (the other being the opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night). In keeping with our approach, we turned this on its head and played the same chord with simple guitar harmonics.
How it’s different from the Beatles’ version:
One reason I am proud of this song is that, while in obvious ways it is very different from the original, in its structure and essence it is completely faithful to the original.
Fun facts:
- The movie reference in the lyrics (“I saw a film today, oh boy. The English Army had just won the war”) is to a film John Lennon acted in called How I Won The War.
- This is a rare Beatles song with a title that is not part of the lyrics.
– CCW