Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

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Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) is the second song off The Beatles' 1965 album Rubber Soul.

Contents

AKA and Working Titles

Writing

John wrote the song while on a skiing holiday in St. Moritz in the Swiss Alps with his wife, Cynthia, George Martin, and his future wife Judy Lockhart-Smith. George Martin injured him self early in the trip. He later recalled, "It was during this time that John was writing songs for Rubber Soul, and one of the songs he composed in the hotel bedroom, while we were all gathered around, nursing my broken foot, was a little ditty he would play to me on his acoustic guitar. The song was Norwegian Wood." The song showed the influence of Bob Dylan, whom the band, especially John, liked ever since they bought his debut record in 1963. The song was about a relationship John was having without Cynthia's knowledge. Pete Shotton, former member of The Quarry Men and John's close personal friend said that the relationship was with a female journalist. John himself has only vaguely talked about the subject. As John later said, "Norwegian Wood was about an affair I was having. I was very careful and paranoid because I didn't want my wife, Cyn, to know that there really was something going on outside the household. I'd always had some kind of affairs going, so I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair, but in such a smokescreen way that you couldn't tell. I can't remember any specific woman it had to do with." John told Rolling Stone in 1970 that Paul helped write the middle eight. However, later on, he claimed to Playboy in 1980 that it was "my song completely." Paul later recalled that he gave help with writing some details of the song, including the title. "I came in and he had this first stanza, which was brilliant: 'I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.' That was all he had, no title, no nothing. I said, 'Oh yes, well, ha, we're there.' And it wrote itself. Once you've got the great idea, they do tend to write themselves, providing you know how to write songs. So I picked it up at the second verse, it's a story. It's him trying to pull a bird, it was about an affair. John told Playboy that he hadn't the faintest idea where the title came from but I do. Peter Asher had his room done out in wood, a lot of people were decorating their places in wood. Norwegian wood. It was pine really, cheap pine. But it's not as good a title, Cheap Pine, baby... So she makes him sleep in the bath and then finally in the last verse I had this idea to set the Norwegian wood on fire as revenge, so we did it very tongue in cheek. She led him on, then said, 'You'd better sleep in the bath'. In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the décor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental." It was one of the first popular songs to feature a sitar. It wasn't th first. In fact, it wasn't even the first Beatles song to feature the sitar. Although not specifically a Beatles song, some of the incidental music from Help! featured indian instruments, including an instrumental called "Another Hard Day's Night," which was a medley of some songs from the film A Hard Day's Night. George later recalled how he got to use the sitar in the song, "I went and bought a sitar from a little shop at the top of Oxford Street called Indiacraft - it stocked little carvings, and incense. It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit. Anyway, we were at the point where we'd recorded the Norwegian Wood backing track and it needed something. We would usually start looking through the cupboard to see if we could come up with something, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up - it was just lying around; I hadn't really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous: I found the notes that played the lick. It fitted and it worked."

Recording

The song was first recorded on October 12, 1965 under the title This Bird Has Flown. It was first recorded live, but as more takes were recorded, it was recorded as one track with several overdubs. As John recalled, "George had just got the sitar and I said, 'Could you play this piece?' We went through many different versions of the song. It was never right and I was getting very angry about it; it wasn't coming out like I said. They said, 'Just do it how you want,' 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 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 learnt the bit and dubbed it on after." The song was remade on October 21. This is when the album version was recorded. On this day, three new takes were recorded, all of which, except for take three, have appeared on album or bootleg. On the mono version of the song, John's double-tracked vocal part coughs as he sings "She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere." In the stereo version, this is edited out.

Recording Sessions


Personnel

The Beatles

Production

Available Versions

Available On

Cover Versions

  • Waterson Carthy
  • Jose Feliciano
  • The Fiery Furnaces
  • Jan & Dean
  • The London Jazz Four
  • Alanis Morissette
  • The Nits
  • Leni Stern
  • U2
  • Victor Wooten

Sources

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