Strawberry Fields Forever

This is the sound of a studio being used as an instrument rather than a room. Famously, it's two entirely different takes — one gentle and slow, one heavier, faster, and scored for cellos and trumpets — spliced together roughly a minute in, in different keys and tempos, salvaged by varispeeding one up and the other down until they nearly met. The seam is audible if you know to listen, and the slight wrongness is precisely what gives the track its underwater unease. It opens with a Mellotron flute patch that sounds like memory malfunctioning. Lennon's voice is drenched, doubled, pitched-down, deliberately stripped of authority — he sounds like someone talking in his sleep. The lyric is genuinely radical in its refusal to assert anything: nothing is real, nothing to get hung about, and then that spiraling admission that no one else is quite on his wavelength, that it's all wrong, that is, he thinks he disagrees. Strawberry Field was a Salvation Army children's home near his Liverpool house where he played as a boy, so beneath the psychedelia sits ordinary, aching nostalgia for a childhood that was never simple. The fade-out returns unexpectedly, muttering. Best heard alone at night, on good headphones, when you want a song that admits uncertainty rather than curing it.