A Day In The Life | Page 9 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

sigh butterfly said
I always thought the song’s title referenced Paul’s part. Without it, I’m not sure A Day In The Life makes sense.

  

Paul’s part isn’t really a “day” — it’s just a half hour in the morning, tops.

The 60s cultural Revolution was double-sided so to speak — the new kids experimenting, the older generation’s traditions decomposing. The latter side had been in the air at that point for decades, with experimental music & arts, the avante-garde, etc.  I see this song as expressing as much that latter side in the form of some stodgy middling-class Brit who “rides the Tube” to work (even if it’s a bus, just a detail) undergoing a meltdown of his worldview & zeitgeist.  That’s why earlier I imagined my video using two quintessential British actors to play the parts, Tom Courtenay who was known to be part of a wave of actors called “Angry Young Men” beginning in the early 60s with his The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), plus the stodgier James Fox for Paul’s part, the prim & proper, and banal & mediocre bureaucrat off to work, who shows signs of falling apart, because the culture is falling apart, etc.  And part of the character’s food for thought hastening his unraveling is the “news” of a fellow bureaucrat committing suicide by shooting himself in the head in a car at a light.  More broadly, part of the falling apart is the usual cliche of the hypocrisy of the old regime, the “news” indicating “4,000 holes” which though Lennon’s inspiration was just what we Americans call road potholes has a sinister implication of killing fields burials, and “Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall” indicating the corruption of the higher class who control society, etc.

If only Paul were still alive so someone could just ask him the bloody question.  Oh wait…

The personnel should have been:

Lennon: piano, vocals

Paul: bass, vocals

George: acoustic guitar

Ringo: drums, bongos

I doubt that Lennon was unable to play the piano part.

Richard said
It isn’t even consistent. Here’s the answer ChatGPT gave me:

The “Ahhhs” heard in the middle section of “A Day In The Life ” from The Beatles’ album “Sgt. Pepper ‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band” were sung by John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison , and Mal Evans, their road manager at the time.

The four of them were recorded individually singing a sustained “Ahhh” sound for as long as they could hold it, and then the four recordings were mixed together and played simultaneously to create the choir-like effect.

  

Interestingly, I don’t hear a choir effect in the normal recording, but when I listened to an isolated track version, I began to hear what sounded like multiple voices — but they weren’t singing all together in unison, but rather floating around each other, at moments together, other moments out of synch, in a swirl.  But 99.9% of people who heard the song didn’t hear the isolation that enables that.  Somehow it seems the engineering “homogenized” what they were doing and made it sound like, effectively, one voice.  At least that’s how my ears experience it.

Illgetyou said

I began to hear what sounded like multiple voices — but they weren’t singing all together in unison, but rather floating around each other,

  

As Paul confirmed when someone DID ask him: “I seem to remember we all did it”.

And there are indeed four different voices, clearly to hear on the isolated track:

Paul – lead aaah

John – high nasal falsetto (exactly the same he uses on “Sexy Sadie “)

George – indifferent low falsetto

Ringo – low octave aaah, unisono with Paul, best audible at the last one.

  

I’d forgotten about “Sexy Sadie ” — that’s a good reference point for similar “ahhhs” from John. 

But how do you know there are 4 distinct voices, and how do you know how to identify each one with each of the Beatles?  For the life of me I can’t make out how many voices there are — much less who’s singing which one.  Not only that, but given that the Beatles routinely taped/tracked over stuff, how can we be sure distinct different voices are live and not tracked over (by the same singer)?