The Best Song From The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’
The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is often seen as the best album ever. But what is the best song from Sgt. Pepper? Here’s a look into a oddball masterpiece.
The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ has the best and the most bizarre song in the history of pop
Sgt. Pepper is often classified as a psychedelic album. That’s accurate, but the track listing varies. It includes baroque pop (“Lovely Rita),” Indian classical music (“Within You Without You”), hard rock (the title track), and circus music (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”). The best song on the record is its most psychedelic — the album closer: “A Day in the Life.”
“A Day in the Life” is superb for two obvious reasons: its instrumentation and its lyrics. Let’s start with the instrumentation. The tune variously sounds loose and tense, poppy and experimental, upbeat and languid. And yet, it never feels disjointed. Every change in the music feels motivated and fluid. In the hands of a lesser band, “A Day in the Life” would be a trainwreck, but The Beatles managed to make the song feel like a smooth journey.
‘Sgt. Pepper’ offers superb poetry
The other reason “A Day in the Life” is a masterpiece is its lyrical poetry. On its surface, the lyrics might feel random. However, they form a compelling portrait of a day in everyone’s life.
The song goes back and forth between portraying mundane activities like combing your air or watching a movie and horrors like untimely deaths. These changes in tone are aided by the track’s changes in sonic textures. Together, “A Day in the Life” portrays the reality of being human. Unimaginable tragedies surround us daily, but we must ignore them just to get through pedestrian tasks.
John Lennon on The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’
During a 1980 interview in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the “Imagine” singer explained the creation of “A Day in the Life.” “Just as it sounds: I was reading the paper one day and noticed two stories,” he recalled. “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. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled. Paul’s contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song, ‘I’d love to turn you on,’ that he’d had floating around in his head and couldn’t use. I thought it was a damn good piece of work.”
John offered measured praise for Sgt. Pepper. “I do like Pepper for what it is,” he said. “I like The White Album for what that is, and I like Revolver and I like Rubber Soul. So there aren’t many others, are there? I also like our first album because we made it in twelve hours.”
Sgt. Pepper is one of the most beloved albums in the history of rock ‘n’ roll — and “A Day in the Life” is its crowning moment.
