The most magical two seconds in pop music

It’s amazing to think that we can pinpoint the most magical two seconds in pop music, which occur exactly one minute into ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ by The Beatles, as Take 7 melts into Take 26.

Listening casually, all you’ll hear at this point is the song ‘kicking in’ – the gentle, dreamy introduction giving way to the heavier, more orchestrated, more percussive body of the song.

Listen to it a lot, over and over, on headphones, and you might notice something else. Although the song doesn’t change key or tempo, it does change. Lennon’s voice becomes thicker and more woozy; the instrumentation shifts; and the mood, for want of a better word, completely alters.

It’s the aural equivalent of a dolly zoom shot in cinema, where the camera moves in one direction on tracks (dolly) while the lens zooms in the other, keeping the subject the same size while the world around them distorts.

In the case of ‘Strawberry Fields’ the word ‘magical’ doesn’t seem like an exaggeration. Here’s how Beatles producer George Martin describes the moment in his 1995 book Summer of Love:

Ever the idealist, and completely without regard for practical problems, John said to me, “I like [both takes]. Why don’t we join them together? You could start with Take 7 and move to Take 20 halfway through to get the grandstand finish.”

“Brilliant!” I replied. “There are only two things wrong with that: the takes are in completely different keys, a whole tone apart; and they have wildly different tempos. Other than that, there should be no problem!” John smiled at my sarcasm with the tolerance of a grown-up placating a child. “Well, George,” he said laconically, I’m sure you can fix it, can’t you?”

With great difficulty, Martin and his team sped up Take 7, and slowed down Take 20, and found that, miraculously, this put them at about the same pitch and speed. To Martin, this seems to have been primarily a technical problem, and he describes the edit as having “always stuck out like a sore thumb for me”. Which it does, I suppose, in rather a wonderful way.

Another comparison might be the feeling you get when you suddenly know that someone is in the room with you – another human being or, if you believe in that sort of things, a ghost. It’s a shiver down the spine trapped on tape.

Take 7 of ‘Strawberry Fields’ is lovely. If that’s the version we’d got as a single it would still be a beloved record.

But running slower, and without that momentous change, while it’s not quite a dirge, it lacks dynamism.

Take 26 is excellent, too. It’s frantic, in-your-face, opening with a blast of those bandstand horns that are all over Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and then lolloping along at full tilt for the full three minutes.

What it lacks is that sense of being gently immersed in the song before the heat’s turned up. It doesn’t have that moment when Lennon does as he’s promised and takes you down.

In the finished mix, that’s what happens at the 1-minute mark: we go down, we’re pulled in, and the song folds over us like a blanket of sweet, warm jam.