Rubber Soul was seen as a major turning point for The Beatles as it signalled an increasing maturity in terms of lyricism and musical influence. Often viewed as a folk project, the album blends various musical styles, including pop, soul, and folk. While many of the songs are influenced by African-American soul artists, the title seemingly appeared as a tongue-in-cheek address of their perceived inauthenticity compared to their sources. During the creation of one of the album’s standout tracks, however, band members John Lennon and George Harrison didn’t exactly encounter the smoothest of rides.
In a 1990 interview, Harrison went so far as to call Rubber Soul his favourite of all the gems within their discography. “Even at that time,” he said, “I think that it was the best one we made; we certainly knew we were making a good album. We did spend a bit more time on it and tried new things. But the most important thing about it was that we were suddenly hearing sounds that we weren’t able to hear before. Also, we were being more influenced by other people’s music and everything was blossoming at that time; including us, because we were still growing.”
He specifically singled out ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ as a particular highlight on the album. He told John Lennon that he “felt where it was coming from”. However, while this was the case, the two seemed to have a slight tiff during its creation. The song was the first Western pop track to use a sitar, which Harrison played on the song. He was new to the instrument, though, and it took multiple takes to get it right. Describing the instrument as “crummy”, he taught himself to play after David Crosby of The Byrds introduced him to the instrument.
Harrison later studied the instrument with musician Ravi Shankar, who helped him explore Eastern music and religion. In 1971, Lennon explained why they decided to use the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’, saying: “I think it was at the studio. George had just got the sitar and I said ‘Could you play this piece?’ We went through many different sort of versions of the song.”
The process didn’t seem that straightforward, however, and soon Lennon grew frustrated as “it was never right, and I was getting very angry about it, it wasn’t coming out like I said.”
He continued: “They said, ‘Well just do it how you want to do it’ and I said, ‘Well I just want to do it like this.’ They let me go and I did the guitar very loudly into the mike and sang it at the same time and then George had the sitar and I asked him could he play the piece that I’d written, you know, dee diddley dee diddley dee, that bit, and he was not sure whether he could play it yet because he hadn’t done much on the sitar but he was willing to have a go, as is his wont, and he learned the bit and dubbed it on after. I think we did it in sections.”
Despite becoming one of the band’s biggest songs, the story behind its lyrics may not be all that simple, either. In fact, it was actually Lennon’s attempt at not uncovering a hard truth. As he once explained: “I was trying to write about an affair without letting my wife know I was having one. I was sort of writing from my experiences – girl’s flats, things like that. I was very careful and paranoid because I didn’t want my wife, Cyn, to know that there really was something going on outside of the household. I’d always had some kind of affairs going on, so I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair, but in such a smoke-screen way that you couldn’t tell. But I can’t remember any specific woman it had to do with.”
