Surrender to the void

The Beatles - 'Tomorrow Never Knows' (Revolver - 1966)

"Tomorrow Never Knows" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written primarily by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney.[7] It was released in August 1966 as the final track on their album Revolver, although it was the first song recorded for the LP. The song marked a radical departure for the Beatles, as the band fully embraced the potential of the recording studio without consideration for reproducing the results in concert.

When writing the song, Lennon drew inspiration from his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD and from the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner. The Beatles' recording employed musical elements foreign to pop music, including musique concrète, avant-garde composition and electro-acoustic sound manipulation.[8] It features an Indian-inspired modal backing of tambura and sitar drone and bass guitar, with minimal harmonic deviation from a single chord, underpinned by a constant but non-standard drum pattern; added to this, tape loops prepared by the band were overdubbed "live" onto the rhythm track. Part of Lennon's vocal was fed through a Leslie speaker cabinet, normally used for a Hammond organ. The song's backwards guitar parts and effects marked the first use of reversed sounds in a pop recording, although the Beatles' 1966 B-side "Rain", which they recorded soon afterwards using the same technique, was issued over three months before Revolver.

"Tomorrow Never Knows" was an early and highly influential recording in the psychedelic and electronic music genres, particularly for its pioneering use of sampling, tape manipulation and other production techniques. It also introduced lyrical themes that espoused mind expansion, anti-materialism and Eastern spirituality into popular music. On release, the song was the source of confusion and ridicule by many fans and journalists; it has since received praise as an effective representation of a psychedelic experience. Pitchfork placed the track at number 19 on its list of "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s", and Rolling Stone ranked it at number 18 on the magazine's list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs.

John Lennon wrote "Tomorrow Never Knows" in January 1966, with lyrics adapted from the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, which was in turn adapted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.[9] Although Beatles aide Peter Brown believed that Lennon's source for the lyrics was the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself, which, he said, Lennon had read while under the influence of LSD,[10] George Harrison later stated that the idea for the lyrics came from Leary, Alpert and Metzner's book.[11] Paul McCartney recalled that when he and Lennon visited the newly opened Indica bookshop, Lennon had been looking for a copy of The Portable Nietzsche and found a copy of The Psychedelic Experience that contained the lines: "Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream."[12]

Lennon said he bought the book, went home, took LSD, and followed the instructions exactly as stated in the text.[13][14] The book held that the "ego death" experienced under the influence of LSD and other psychedelic drugs is essentially similar to the dying process and requires similar guidance.[15][16] This is a state of being known by eastern mystics and masters as samādhi (a state of being totally aware of the present moment; a one-pointedness of mind).[citation needed] Harrison questioned whether Lennon fully understood the meaning of the song's lyrics:

Basically [the song] is saying what meditation is all about. The goal of meditation is to go beyond (that is, transcend) waking, sleeping and dreaming... I am not too sure if John actually fully understood what he was saying. He knew he was onto something when he saw those words and turned them into a song. But to have experienced what the lyrics in that song are actually about? I don't know if he fully understood it.[11]

The title never appears in the song's lyrics. Lennon later revealed that, like "A Hard Day's Night", it was taken from one of Ringo Starr's malapropisms.[13] In a television interview in early 1964, Starr had uttered the phrase "Tomorrow never knows" when laughing off an incident that took place at the British Embassy in Washington, DC, during which one of the guests had cut off a portion of his hair.[17][18] The piece was originally titled "Mark I"[12][19] and was referred to as such in the EMI studio documentation until the Beatles were remixing tracks for the Revolver album in June.[20] "The Void" is cited as another working title, but according to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, this resulted from Neil Aspinall, the band's road manager and assistant, referring to it as such in a contemporary issue of The Beatles Book.[21] Lennon said he settled on Starr's phrase "to sort of take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics".[22] He also said "The Void" would have been a more suitable title, but he was concerned about its obvious drug connotations.[23] According to Aspinall's account in The Beatles Monthly, the musical portion of the song was the result of all four Beatles working to ensure the music matched the power of Lennon's lyrics: "The basic tune was written during the first hours of the recording session."[24]

McCartney remembered that even though the song's harmony was mainly restricted to the chord of C, George Martin, the Beatles' producer, accepted it as it was and said it was "rather interesting".[11][nb 1] The harmonic structure is derived from Indian music, a genre that Harrison had introduced to the Beatles' sound late in 1965 with his sitar part on "Norwegian Wood", and is based on a high volume C drone played on a tambura.[26] The song's musical key is C Mixolydian.[27] The chord over the drone is generally C major, but some changes to B♭ major result from vocal modulations, as well as orchestral and guitar tape loops.[28][29]

According to author Peter Lavezzoli, the composition is the first pop song to eschew formal chord changes altogether.[30][nb 2] Despite this limitation, musicologist Dominic Pedler sees the Beatles' harmonic ingenuity displayed in the upper harmonies – "Turn off your mind", for example, is a run of unvarying E melody notes, before "relax" involves an E–G melody-note shift and "float downstream" an E–C–G descent.[34] "It is not dying" involves a run of three G melody notes that rise on "dying" to a B♭, at the start of the verse's fifth bar,[35] creating a ♭VII/I (B♭/C) "slash" polychord.[34][nb 3] Due to Lennon's adherence to Leary's text, "Tomorrow Never Knows" was also the first song by the Beatles to depart from any form of rhyming scheme.[19]

"Tomorrow Never Knows" was the first song attempted during the sessions for Revolver,[37] which started at 8 pm on 6 April 1966,[38] in Studio 3 at EMI Studios (subsequently Abbey Road Studios).[12] Geoff Emerick, who was promoted to the role of the Beatles' recording engineer for Revolver, recalled that the band "encouraged us to break the rules" and ensure that each instrument "should sound unlike itself".[39] Lennon sought to capture the atmosphere of a Tibetan Buddhist ceremony;[40] he told Martin that the song should sound like it was being chanted by a thousand Tibetan monks, with his vocal evoking the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop.[41][42] The latter effect was achieved by using a Leslie speaker. When the concept was explained to Lennon, he inquired if the same effect could be achieved by hanging him upside down and spinning him around a microphone while he sang into it.[12][43] Emerick made a connector to break into the electronic circuitry of the Leslie cabinet and then re-recorded the vocal as it came out of the revolving speaker.[44][45]

Further to their approach when recording Rubber Soul late the previous year, the Beatles and Martin embraced the idea of the recording studio as an instrument on Revolver, particularly "Tomorrow Never Knows".[46] As Lennon hated doing a second take to double his vocals, Ken Townsend, the studio's technical manager, developed an alternative form of double-tracking called artificial double tracking (ADT) system, taking the signal from the sync head of one tape machine and delaying it slightly through a second tape machine.[47] The two tape machines used were not driven by mains electricity, but from a separate generator which put out a particular frequency, the same for both, thereby keeping them locked together.[47] By altering the speed and frequencies, he could create various effects, which the Beatles used throughout the recording of Revolver.[48] Lennon's vocal is double-tracked on the first three verses of the song: the effect of the Leslie cabinet can be heard after the (backwards) guitar solo.[49]

The track includes the highly compressed drums that the Beatles favoured at the time, with reverse cymbals, reverse guitar, processed vocals, looped tape effects, and sitar and tambura drone.[43] In the description of musicologist Russell Reising, the "meditative state" of a psychedelic experience is conveyed through the musical drone, enhancing the lyrical imagery, while the "buzz" of a drug-induced "high" is sonically reproduced in Harrison's tambura rhythm and Starr's heavily treated drum sound.[35] Despite the implied chord changes in the verses and repeatedly at the end of the song,[35] McCartney's bass maintains a constant ostinato in C.[50] Reising writes of the drum part: