A Day in The Life - Sergeant Pepper's "encore"

A perfect encore to arguably the best Rock'n'Roll album of all time: Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is set up like a live performance, with each song running together. "A Day in the Life" is the very last track of this album, and at the very beginning of the track one can still hear the crowd cheering for "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"; it is as though the imaginary band has silenced the crowd with this final encore.

1. Lyrics - "Inflame my senses and sensibilities"

(About the Story:)
John Lennon: I was writing "A Day In the Life" with the Daily Mail propped in front of me on the piano. I noticed two stories. One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash.

Paul McCartney: John got 'he blew his mind out in a car' from a newspaper story. We transposed it a bit - 'blew his mind out' was a bit dramatic. In fact, he crashed his car. But that's what we were saying about history … that all history is a lie, because every fact that gets reported gets distorted.

There are two main speakers in the song who are seemingly completely concerned with two different aspects of life; their juxtaposition is interesting - the one speaker talking about a dream world while the other concerned with the mundane details of life. While the first speaker is unable to react in a normal way to events he finds out about in the paper; he laughs at a man who dies in his car, he looks at a war film that everyone else turns away from; the second speaker acts in a completely normal way until he "goes into a dream."

The two speakers also seem to interact with each other. The first speaker wakes up the second speaker by saying "I'd love to turn you on;" and later the speaker invokes the first speaker (somebody spoke and I went into a dream).

The change in speakers is also accompanied by a key change. The beginning of the piece is sort of ambiguous in key, somewhere between Gmajor and E minor (however it sounds very minor). The middle part with Paul singing changes to E major.

2. Text painting - the music imitates the words

- After the man "blew his mind out in a car" the drums enter for the first time, as though you can hear the man blow his mind out.

- The alarm clock which wakes up the speaker of the middle section, who begins with the line "woke up, fell out of bed."

- "Looking up I noticed I was late," someone pants, anticipating the man rushing to the bus in "seconds flat."

- After Paul sings "Somebody spoke and I went into a dream," John immediately begins singing, as though he is the speaker in Paul's dreams; then the song returns to the original material.

3. Other fresh things

About the orchestra crescendo:
Paul selling the idea to John: 'We take fifteen bars, just an arbitrary amount, and then we'll try something new. We'll tell the orchestra to start on whatever the lowest note on their instrument is, and to arrive at the highest note on their instrument. But to do it in their own time.' We actually put that in the score: 'From here you're on your own.' The result was a crazy big swing storm, which we put together with all the other little ideas. It was very exciting to be doing that instead of twelve-bar blues.

Orchestra members description:
I had to go round to all the session musicians and talk to them: 'You've got fifteen bars. If you want to go together, you can.' The trumpet players, always famous for their fondness of lubricating substances, didn't care, so they'd be there at the note ahead of everyone. The strings all watched each other like little sheep: 'Are you going up?' - 'Yes' - 'So am I.' And they'd go up a little more, all very delicate and cozy, all going up together. But listen to those trumpets - they're just freaking out.

- The huge E major chord at the end of the piece which is played by several different pianos at once, which closes the music of Sergeant Pepper's, bringing it to completion.

- After this chord the Beatles experimented with recordings of people saying phrases; these phrases were looped backwards or in other strange ways in order to create interesting nonsensical chatter. One of the understandable phrases is "It never could be any other way," which could go along with the E major chord in supporting the cohesiveness of the album (i.e. Sergeant Pepper's never could be any other way).

--Rob Stephens