“A Day in the Life” by The Beatles

"A Day in the Life" closes Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles' 1967 album, and it's the most staggering four-way collision the group ever put on tape. John Lennon wrote most of the opening and closing sections, drawing on newspaper stories of the day, among them the death of Guinness heir Tara Browne, while Paul McCartney supplied the middle, a memory of his younger years: catching the bus, a smoke, getting to class. All four Beatles shaped how it came together.

Lennon's acoustic guitar and dreamy lead vocal float over McCartney's bass and piano and Ringo Starr's drums and congas, with George Harrison on maracas, George Martin on harmonium and Mal Evans on piano and spoken vocals. Then comes the madness: twice, a full orchestra of strings, brass and woodwinds claws its way up the scale in a partly improvised avant-garde smear, and after the second one the song slams shut on one of the most famous chords in pop, struck on several keyboards and left to hang in the air. Martin produced and Geoff Emerick engineered.

The BBC initially banned it from broadcast over a line heard as a drug reference. It later inspired the THX company's Deep Note sound, and it's commonly held up as the Beatles' finest song.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.