Album: Revolver.
Year: 1966.
This fucking thing. The beautiful fucking thing.
There is an entire lifetime between the initial “She said” … “I know what it’s like to be dead.” Or an entire deathtime, I guess. It’s one of the most beautiful uses of negative space in all of popular music.
I know that “Tomorrow Never Knows” is the more formal experiment on Revolver, the song on which Mad Men spent a zillion dollars to once and for all to show us the audience that former King of the World Don Draper was now old and out of it. And no doubt it – and all of Revolver – is a major achievement.
But I said …
…
…
…
…
… "She Said She Said" is pretty damn close to my most favorite song in the universe, combining the trippy drums of “Rain,” the tough guitar of “Paperback,” that infinite edge-of-consciousness organ, and maybe the best lyrics John Lennon ever put on paper.
What it’s like to be dead, what it is to be sad, and making no distinction, so that sadness is the same as death. And death is like having never been born.
Of course, it could just be the drugs, because when I was a boy, I never even thought about this shit. Or maybe I’m just lying to myself.
Fan-made video for “She Said She Said”
My Certain Songs Playlist on Spotify