Grapthar's Song of the Day: The Beatles 'I Am The Walrus'

grapthar (74)in #music • 6 years ago

The Beatles - I Am The Walrus

I know I have shared a lot

of Beatles stuff before, and a Lennon song yesterday, but I was learning this on guitar today, so it seemed like a good song of the day. This song is from my favorite album of theirs, Magical Mystery Tour, released in 1967. This was the follow up to Sgt Peppers, which was a mind blowing album, unlike anything released before it, and this album doesn't disappoint. The general timbre is very psychedelic, but they use lots of orchestral instrumentation throughout, and in this track in particular.

Listen to I Am The Walrus here.

This song is SO interesting on so many levels:

the lyrics are incredibly weird, written to confuse pretentious art lovers of the time who were analyzing all of his lyrics and finding deep meanings when there weren't any, so he wrote a track that was essentially gibberish, trolling the musical "elite". Harmonically, this song is interesting too, parts of it are essentially in Aminor (but they use the parallel major of A major, with other chords from A minor), but then we modulate into Emajor, but use the 6 and 7 from E minor (C and D major chords), which give it that sort of confused, but still musically connected, sort of feel. They also move from an Fmajor chord to a Bmajor, which is a tritone movement, but it doesn't feel dissonant; it just sort of fits with the general psychedelic weirdness around it. I love the orchestral instrumentation too, it definitely helps to spread out the harmony and make strange chord changes seem more normal and pleasing to our ears.