Strawberry Fields

Τραγούδι από εκείνα που σε κάνουν να αναρωτιέσαι γιατί δεν το ρίχνεις στα ναρκωτικά! Μια χαρά φαίνονται να περνάνε αυτοί που τα παίρνουν… Τέλος πάντων, τώρα στα γεράματα, χαίρομαι που επιτέλους το έχω σε mp3 (μόλις χτες το τσίμπησα!) για να με συνοδεύει όλες τις ώρες στο αυτοκίνητο…
Στιχοί και πληροφορίες για το τραγούδι και μια συνέντευξη του John Lennon σχετικά με αυτό.
Σόρρυ για τα αγγλικά αλλά… πολλή δουλειά σήμερα!
Enjoy!

Strawberry Fields
(John Lennon/Paul McCartney)
Let me take you down, 'cos I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real, and nothing to get hungabout
Strawberry Fields forever
Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out, it doesn't matter much to me
Let me take you down, 'cos I'm going to
Strawberry Fields Nothing is real, and nothing to get hungabout
Strawberry Fields forever
No one I think is in my tree,
I mean it must be high or low
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right, that is I think it's not too bad
Let me take you down, 'cos I'm going to
Strawberry Fields Nothing is real, and nothing to get hungabout
Strawberry Fields forever
Always, no sometimes, think it's me, but you know I know when it's a dream I think I know I mean a "Yes" but it's all wrong, that is I think I disagree
Let me take you down, 'cos I'm going to
Strawberry Fields Nothing is real, and nothing to get hungabout
Strawberry Fields forever
Strawberry Fields forever
Strawberry Fields forever


Composition and recording (από το site της Wikipedia)

Lennon began writing the song in late 1966, while in Almeria, Spain filming Richard Lester's How I Won The War, though he can be seen and heard playing the introductory notes on a melodica in a hotel room in the film "The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit" which was filmed in February 1964.
Lennon and McCartney's songs shared a similar theme of nostalgia for their childhood in Liverpool and both referred to actual locations there, but they also had strong surrealistic and psychedelic overtones. Strawberry Field was a Salvation Army orphanage just around the corner from Lennon's boyhood home in Woolton. Lennon and his childhood friends Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan used to play in the trees behind the orphanage. One of Lennon's childhood treats was the garden party that took place each summer in the grounds of Strawberry Field. Lennon's Aunt Mimi recalled: "As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, 'Mimi, come on. We're going to be late.'"[1]
The period of its composition was one of momentous change and dislocation for Lennon: The Beatles had just retired from touring after one of the most difficult periods of their career, including the infamous "more popular than Jesus" controversy and their disastrous tour of the Philippines; Lennon's marriage was failing; perhaps most significant of all, he was using increasing quantities of drugs, especially the powerful hallucinogen LSD. Although there are no obvious references to drugs, the song's style and tone and oblique, stream of consciousness lyrics often are thought to have been influenced by his LSD experiences.
The song's groundbreaking production by recording engineer Geoff Emerick and complex arrangement gave clear evidence of the band's near-total mastery in the studio and their increasingly avant-garde approach to their music. It featured extensive overdubbing, the prominent use of reverse tape effects and tape loops, and extensive audio compression and equalisation. As well as the standard guitar-bass-drums backing, the arrangement also included piano, Mellotron (played by McCartney), slide guitar, trumpets, cellos and some unusual instruments including the swarmandel, an Indian stringed instrument which provided the sitar-like sound at the end of each chorus.

Ακολουθεί η συνέντευξη του Lennon στο περιοδικό Playboy:

“Strawberry Fields is a real place. After I stopped living at Penny Lane, I moved in with my auntie who lived in the suburbs in a nice semidetached place with a small garden and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around - - not the poor slummy kind of image that was projected in all the Beatles stories. In the class system, it was about half a class higher than Paul, George and Ringo, who lived in government-subsidized housing. We owned our house and had a garden. They didn't have anything like that. Near that home was Strawberry Fields, a house near a boys' reformatory where I used to go to garden parties as a kid with my friends Nigel and Pete. We would go there and hang out and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. We always had fun at Strawberry Fields. So that's where I got the name. But I used it as an image. Strawberry Fields forever. [Singing] "(Living is easy) With eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you see." It still goes, doesn't it? Aren't I saying exactly the same thing now? The awareness apparently trying to be expressed is -- let's say in one way I was always hip. I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from the others. I was different all my life. The second verse goes, "No one I think is in my tree." Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius -- "I mean it must be high or low," the next line. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn't see. I thought I was crazy or an egomaniac for claiming to see things other people didn't see. As a child, I would say, "But this is going on!" and everybody would look at me as if I was crazy. I always was so psychic or intuitive or poetic or whatever you want to call it, that I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way. It was scary as a child, because there was nobody to relate to. Neither my auntie nor my friends nor anybody could ever see what I did. It was very, very scary and the only contact I had was reading about an Oscar Wilde or a Dylan Thomas or a Vincent van Gogh -- all those books that my auntie had that talked about their suffering because of their visions. Because of what they saw, they were tortured by society for trying to express what they were. I saw loneliness." - John Lennon, Playboy, 1980