Tomorrow Never Knows

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"Tomorrow Never Knows" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written primarily by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. 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. [Wikipedia]

Lennon adapted the lyric from Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience, itself a Westernised reading of the Bardo Thödol (the 'Tibetan Book of the Dead'). The title — 'tomorrow never knows' — was taken from a Ringo malapropism, a phrase the drummer had used in passing. John Lennon's closing vision 'Tomorrow Never Knows,' based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, ranks among the most experimental and prescient recordings the Beatles produced. The song's disorienting vocal processing, tape-loop accompaniment, and sitar and tabla integration created a psychedelic soundscape that anticipated electronic music and drone traditions. Lennon's lead vocal, processed through a Leslie speaker cabinet to create otherworldly effect, delivered philosophical abstraction with hypnotic precision (Lewisohn 1988, p.70). Kozinn positions both 'Tomorrow Never Knows' and 'She Said She Said' as vivid psychedelic narratives rich in LSD-influenced imagery, representing the album's sophisticated engagement with drug experimentation and surrealist lyrical composition. (Kozinn 1995, p.146,152)

Cut in a single afternoon on 6 April 1966 — the very first session of the Revolver project. The track is built on a single chord (C), Ringo playing a heavily-compressed loop-feel pattern, McCartney's bass providing the harmonic motion. Lennon's vocal was fed through a rotating Leslie speaker (taken from an organ cabinet) for the second half of the track — a Geoff Emerick experiment that violated EMI engineering protocols. Five tape loops, prepared on home Brennell machines, were fed in live to the mix from five different studios on EMI's three floors, each operated by a separate engineer with a finger on the spool to maintain pitch. Recorded across multiple sessions beginning the track employed extensive tape-loop techniques with pre-recorded fragments of sitar, tabla, and orchestral materials layered beneath Lennon's vocal. George Martin's pioneering use of ADT (Automatic Double Tracking) and Leslie speaker processing created the song's signature vocal character. Geoff Emerick's engineering mastered the technical challenges of layering and mixing disparate sound sources into coherent psychedelic composition (Lewisohn 1988, p.70).

Inspired Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds production approach, the entire psychedelic genre, and (almost direct) Steve Jobs' 1984 Macintosh launch quote. Sampled by Chemical Brothers (Setting Sun) and others; commonly cited as the first track to bring musique concrète into mainstream pop. Tomorrow Never Knows occupies 18 pages in Lewisohn's coverage, among the most extensively documented Beatles recordings. John Lennon lead vocals appear in 73 canon songs, with 26 in Revolver, establishing this as characteristic Revolver-era work. The key of C major is shared with 31 canon songs overall, with none in Revolver. As the Revolver album closer and one of rock music's first fully realized psychedelic recordings, the track established a template for later psychedelic experimentation and influenced progressive rock, electronic music, and ambient traditions (Lewisohn 1988, p.70).

• Nicholas Schaffner said that listeners who had been confused by the song's lyrics were most likely unfamiliar with hallucinogenic drugs and Timothy Leary's message, but that the transcendental quality became clear during the build-up to the 1967 Summer of Love. According to Colin Larkin, writing in the
• According to Simon Philo, "Tomorrow Never Knows" was the most groundbreaking track on an album that announced the arrival of the "underground London" sound. Barry Miles also sees it as the experimental highpoint of Revolver, which he recalls as an "advertisement for the underground" and a work...