She Said She Said by The Beatles

‘She Said She Said,’ tucked inside the Beatles’ ground-breaking 1966 album, Revolver, is a track that’s catchy and yet… ‘slightly unwell’. It starts as psychedelic rock, and ends somewhere inside a disturbed memory.

John Lennon’s lyrics stem from an LSD-fuelled encounter with actor Peter Fonda, whose repeated talk of knowing ‘what it’s like to be dead’ deeply irritated him. Lennon turned the episode into something darker: a conversation in which death, childhood, and the unsettling unreliability of experience bleed into one another. The sudden recollection of childhood-- When I was a boy everything was right--gives the song its emotional kink.

Musically, the brilliance lies in making instability groove. Guitars shimmer and snarl. The metre shifts. The bass pushes and pulls. And Ringo Starr is magnificent. Rather than simply planting the backbeat, he it, circling it with toms, fills, and wonderfully restless accents.


As Lennon intones, ‘I said, ‘Even though you know what you know,’/ I know that I’m ready to leave/ ’Cause you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born,’ we are left listening, and for 2 min 39 sec, evaporating.