St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: A Music Analysis
1346 Words6 Pages
This music study will compare and contrast the psychedelic theme in Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) by The Beatles. These song collations show a pre-psychedelic stylistic focus of the Lennon/McCartney song-writing duo in Revolver, which soon transformed into a more expansive psychedelic style in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Revolver presents a few songs in the formation of a pre-psychedelic song style in “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Here, There and Everywhere” that defines the drug-induced melodies that are part of instrumentation and vocal approaches to songwriting. The Beatles chose this style as part of the formative psychedelic statement they made in St. Pepper’s in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"…show more content… Pepper’s. More so, McCartney uses a Lowrey organ/piano to create an eerie effect that expands the psychedelic sound of Lennon’s voice. Of course, Lennon was presumed to written this song under the influence of LSD, more importantly, the acronym for “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” effectively spells out LSD in the title: “most musical scholars believe that Sgt. Pepper’s represents the full flowering of the Beatles’ psychedelia” (105). In contrast to the songs of Revolver, Lennon is speaking more directly about the psychedelic/drug influence on his songwriting. Lennon’s lyrics define the drug-induced imagery of psychedelic influence, which removed all the barriers of previous songs: “Picture yourself in a boat on a river/ With tangerine trees and marmalade skies/ Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly/ A girl with kaleidoscope eyes” (Lennon). These lyrics are clearly sung I the same fashion of those on Revolver, but the references to LSD are undeniable as a source of psychedelic theme that becomes codified in the song. These are the important similarities and differences between Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s that illustrate the evolution of psychedelic songwriting over the course of 1966 and into