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Linde said

Expert Textpert said
 

At the exact point in this song where they start singing “1 2 3 4 5 6 7, all good children go to heaven,” I always start getting goosebumps and find myself transported somewhere else.  Pure genius.

That bit is creepy.

 

Well, I think it’s more a reflection of Lennon’s typically cheeky and wry commentary about religious “dogma” (which is always bad, of course).

LOL — Beatles fans bickering interminably about the technical minutiae and we non-geeks will apparently never know what the actual truth of the matter is. If only Paul’s memory wasn’t strangely impaired and if only there existed journalists to ask him questions like this.

Expert Textpert said
 

At the exact point in this song where they start singing “1 2 3 4 5 6 7, all good children go to heaven,” I always start getting goosebumps and find myself transported somewhere else.  Pure genius.

  

I’m not so much replying to Expert Textpert as using his comment as a springboard.  After reading Joe’s description of the recording of it, I noted it was one of those that Paul worked on over many iterations and many days and many layers (a process I elsewhere described as “cobbling together” but which I really meant “constructing from many different parts over time unlike conventional song recording done mostly whole in a few takes at most”). 

It occurs to me that YNGMYM is seen as (and I consider it as) part of the Abbey Road “medley” — and yet it lacks one major feature of the medley songs: it doesn’t segue neatly into the next tune.  In Joe’s description, he says Paul spent a lot of time over many days experimenting with different ways to blend the ending with the following song (Sun King ).  What strikes me is how his final result is the least organic and most drawn-out sounding of all the transitions — and uniquely it’s the only one that ends as a fade-out (which probably contributed to the difficulty of blending).  I just wonder if Paul could have thought of a snappier transition, like all the other medley transitions, perhaps sacrificing the fade-out — not sacrificing the “1 2 3 4 5 6 7, all good children go to heaven” chant, but just not lapsing into a fade-out. 

For example, off the top of my head, here would be a possible way:  imagine the “1 2 3 4 5 6 7, all good children go to heaven” starts and goes along as it does on the record, then instead of fading out, it keeps repeating for another few times, then suddenly on the last iteration, it stops cold on “4” — “1 2 3 4!” — where the “4” also has an echo effect.  Followed by approximately 1.5 seconds of silence, then, just as we hear it now, the deep strings of the electric guitar at the beginning of “Sun King ” start.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the way it Paul did it already.  It just nags at me how it lacks a snappy transition like the other medley pieces.

LOL