The making of Strawberry Fields

"Strawberry Fields Forever" (1967) is certainly one of the most complex songs in the Beatles' entire production. I remember that when I heard it (I was 13 and already studying music) it made a great impression on me precisely because it was a harmonically different song from the usual ones and with sounds that were new for the time.

Released as a single in February 1967, it was the B-side of Penny Lane. Both are nostalgic songs: "Strawberry Field" was the name of an orphanage located on Beaconsfield Road, Woolton, Liverpool, near Lennon's childhood home (pictured is the orphanage gate). He and his playmates Pete Shotton, Nigel Whalley, and Ivan Vaughan used to play in the tree-lined garden behind the building.

It was later included on the LP Magical Mistery Tour. It is attributed to Lennon alone, who began working on it in Almería, Spain, during the filming of Richard Lester's "How I Won the War" in September–October 1966. Its gestation was long and complicated, with numerous recordings, some of which were incomplete and arranged differently, two of which were later cut, linked, and mixed until the final product was obtained. It should be remembered that the recorders available at the time had a maximum of 4 tracks, not the 48 or 64 of the machines of the 1980s or the hundreds of today's HD recording, so the possible overdubs were very limited. You could certainly take four tracks and mix them into one (mono) or two (because the song ultimately had to be stereo), putting them on a second recorder, then recording another four tracks and repeating the same process, but each mix introduced a bit of background noise and required synchronizing multiple recorders, with the consequence that even getting to 16 tracks was difficult.

Fortunately, the Beatles, who were more or less self-taught musically, weren't very good at writing down their ideas on a staff: their method of memorizing them was to record. Now that even the Beatles' demo tapes and unused recordings have been released, we can reconstruct the entire process that led to the final version of Strawberry Fields and also appreciate the essential contribution of their arranger and engineer George Martin.

Here are two videos that attempt to clarify the various stages through which the song passed: from the first hints of Lennon soloing on guitar to Martin's orchestral arrangement. The videos are shown below. This article by Joe Brennan of Columbia University (author of a helpful guide to Beatles recordings) is more comprehensive, but less straightforward. This Wikipedia page also offers a lot of useful information.

Note that in some parts of the video, the sound may only come from one speaker (usually the left) because it is a temporary monophonic mix. In others, you can hear an instrumental ensemble on one drum and a single instrument or two on the other: the latter are those recorded on the new tracks, using the previous mix as a base.

Back