Zegras11
Footballguy
Tomorrow Never KnowsTomorrow Never Knows
2022 Ranking: 17
2022 Lists: 21
2022 Points: 382
Ranked Highest by: @DaVinci (1) @Pip's Invitation (1) @pecorino (1) @Eephus (1) @otb_lifer (1) @Ilov80s (2) @Dwayne Hoover (2) Craig (3) @FairWarning (3) @rockaction (6) @Ted Lange as your Bartender (6) Worth (8) @ProstheticRGK (8) @jamny (9) @wikkidpissah (10)
2019 Ranking/Lists/Pts: 29/8/135
Getz: FIVE 1st place votes!! Only THREE songs had more. NINE Top 3 votes!! Only FOUR songs had more. Moved up 12 slots in 2022, with 13 more voters and 247 more points.
Krista4
My 2019 ranking: 45
2019 write-up:
Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver, 1966)
There's so much to say about this song, about its production, the various innovations, that I'm sure I'll leave a lot of important stuff out. I love this song. It could be such a ####### mess, but it's not. I love the drums, and the wah-wah-wah-wah bird-type sounds (more on that below). The spooky vocals, the tambour, tambourines, the dissonance. The fact that it's all (almost) entirely one damn chord. It's aural collage unlike anything produced before it.
John's lyrics were inspired by Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience, his interpretation of the philosophy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. While he initially wanted to call the song "The Void," he was afraid that would not be understood by the fans at this time, so he adopted a Ringoism for the title instead. To be honest, I don't pay attention to these lyrics, but maybe others connect with them on a much deeper level than I'm capable of.
For me, this is all about the music, including how Ringo and Paul keep it all together with the chaos that's going on about them. There are so many innovations in this song that I won't discuss in detail, such as the backward reverb guitar parts, but I'll mention a few. John instructed that he wanted his voice to sound "like the Dalai chanting from a mountaintop," which led to Geoff Emerick's idea to channel John's vocal through a Leslie speaker after the first verse. The effect was that haunting, distant sound that matches perfectly with the lyrics.
The drum sounds were also new to recording based on a couple of ideas. Blatantly contravening EMI rules to keep microphones at least two feet from the drums, the microphones were put only a few inches away. In addition, to dampen the ringing from the bass drum, a large sweater was stuffed in against the rear beater skin. The results were these full, energetic drums heard on the record.
As for the tape loops, these were originally from Paul, who was experimenting more with avant garde music at the time than the others, and who'd removed the erase-head from his home tape recorder, allowing additional sounds to be recorded each time the tape spooled through. All the band members were given an assignment to make some tape loops and bring them back the studio, after which the group listened to the loops backward, forward, slowed down, sped up, any which way, until five were chosen, including the one that sounds like seagulls but is actually Paul laughing. Then the loops were added to the track: "Every tape machine in every studio was commandeered and every available EMI employee was given the task of holding a pencil or drinking glass to give the loops the proper tensioning. In many instances, this meant they had to be standing out in the hallway, looking quite sheepish." At the same time, in the control room Emerick and Martin "huddled over the console, raising and lowering faders to shouted instructions from John, Paul, George and Ringo. (‘Let’s have that seagull sound now!’...) With each fader carrying a different loop, the mixing desk acted like a synthesizer, and we played it like a musical instrument, too, carefully overdubbing textures to the prerecorded backing track." As a result, the recorded version of this song could not possibly be re-produced.
Mr. krista: "The vocal thing that happens there is Lennon singing through a Leslie speaker, usually used with a Hammond organ, but Lennon sang vocals through it instead. This happens all the time now. But maybe never before this. But still sounds so modern. Sounds like it could have happened any time. In terms of sound capture, this is an incredible record, and this is particularly an incredible track. I doubt anyone had used multi-track recording quite like this. There’s 24 tracks of wildly different sonic information with nothing to do with each other, but then assembled into a song that fits on the record…and it’s one chord! There’s so much weirdness going on on that. It’s so psychedelic."
Suggested cover: Nah, that doesn't seem right for this one. The genius is in the innovation and the one-time nature of the sound.
2022 Supplement: The squillion paragraphs above leave me little to say that’s new, so check out Take 1, which was released in the Anthology series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtmukKLZQUw After hearing this played back, John asked that he be suspended from a rope in the middle of the room and given a push, and then he would sing into a mike below him while spinning ‘round. This seems like the only idea for a special effect that the band DIDN’T use in this song!
Paul was impressed with the final outcome of this song: "Pretty stones, if you ask me! As time went on we had much more freedom. We had much longer to do things. But it actually spurred us on to do some new stuff, so the drum sound on this is, I love it!" John, on the other hand, was characteristically unsatisfied with even this, one of my most brilliant works. He had come to the song with a vision of hundreds of monks chanting, and when they didn’t do that, he never quite got the sounds he wanted: “It was a little boring, and I really didn't like it. I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing. I realize now that was what I wanted.”
Guido Merkins
By 1966 the Beatles were ready to fully embrace the potential of the studio. They had no plans to tour and therefore, didn’t care whether or not a song could be reproduced on stage. To that end, the Revolver sessions began in 1966 with a song with the working title of Mark 1, a name that kind of sounds like an experimental model of a new song or something. The song would eventually be given a throwaway Ringo-ism, Tomorrow Never Knows.
Revolver was a huge departure for the Beatles as a whole, but I can only imagine what the reaction was when listeners got to the last song on the album. They must have been thinking “what on earth was that?” Tomorrow Never Knows lyrics are from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and was written mostly on one chord, C major, with a slight change to B flat major on the word “dying” (it is not dying). George Martin, to his credit, didn't scoff at this. On the contrary, he thought it was interesting.
The first take of Tomorrow Never Knows could hardly be different from the finished version, and yet it is no less stunning. John’s instruction was that he wanted to sound like the “Dali Lama singing on the highest mountain top, yet you can hear every word.” Geoff Emerick thought putting John’s voice through a Leslie speaker would accomplish that, and it did. That’s what you hear on Take 1 along with Ringo’s hypnotic beat and guitars also put through the Leslie speaker which achieves a sort of underwater sound. You can hear take one on Anthology 2.
The final version was a series of tape loops, first suggested by Paul. Sounds of Paul laughing and sped up (the seagull sound), a mellotron on flute settings, an orchestral B flat major, and a sped up sitar. The loops were fed into the recording desk, then the engineer “played” the faders on the desk like a synthesizer raising and lowering it at various points. George also played a tabla which was a background drone throughout. John’s voice was treated by ADT, then switched over to the Leslie after the “solo.” An out of tune honky tonk piano ends it all during the fade.
Tomorrow Never Knows still sounds like music of the future. The hypnotic drum beat alone was a template for dance music for the next 40 years. Any artist who uses samples or loops, in some way, are being influenced by Tomorrow Never Knows without even knowing it.
It’s a brilliant piece of music and the Beatles at their most groundbreaking.
64 List Rank: 32
64 List Voters/Points: 15/535
64 List Top 5: 2 @Pip's Invitation (1) @otb_lifer (1)
64 List Top 10: 5 (7, 9, 10)
64 List 1-25 votes: 6 (21)
64 List 26-64 votes: 9
First song with a #1 vote and it received two.
First song with two Top 5 votes.
First song to have five Top 10 votes.
Dropped 15 slots from the 2022 countdown. What?
No bandwagon here as I had this at #16 in 2019. #5 this time. I found 7 of the 8 voters from 2019, and only 
