Tomorrow Never Knows

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.

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.

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.