Every classic rock fan can remember one or two songs that left them slack-jawed. A rock star was blown away by one of the songs from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He said the tune put John Lennon’s genius on full display. The star in question put his own spin on the track with some help from Miley Cyrus.
A rock star wanted to understand how a song from The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ came together
Wayne Coyne is the frontman of The Flaming Lips, a band behind numerous psychedelic experiments such as “She Don’t Use Jelly.” During a 2014 interview with Newsweek, he recalled his reaction to “A Day in the Life” from Sgt. Pepper. “The ‘Day in the Life’ song is one of the marks of the sheer genius of not just John Lennon but The Beatles as singers, as players, as arrangers, as conceptualizing,” he said.
“It’s just a timeless, eerie, strange song. Even by songwriters’ standards, it’s like ‘What the f*** are they doing there?’” he continued. “If you’re a band that likes to make their own records and have their own recording studio, like we are, it’s just compelling to think about how did they do this and how did they arrange this and how did they make these things happen.”
Wayne Coyne discussed what The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ meant to him
While discussing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Coyne discussed the importance of Sgt. Pepper to him. “Even if you didn’t like the rest of Sgt. Pepper’s or what it meant … I think those are by anybody’s standards stellar, stellar recordings,” he said.
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“I was born in 1961, and my older brothers and my older sister and all their crazy friends — they loved a lot of music, but they loved, loved, loved The Beatles,” Coyne added. “The Beatles have been a presence in my whole life.” The Flaming Lips released an unorthodox cover of “A Day in the Life” with Miley Cyrus. Coyne named “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” as some of his other favorites by the group.
John Lennon said he wrote ‘A Day in the Life’ under pressure
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features an interview from 1980. In it, John discussed “A Day in the Life” multiple times. He said he had only 10 days to write the track and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” He felt “pressure” during that time.
John looked back on “A Day in the Life” fondly. He praised Paul McCartney’s contribution to the song, specifically the line “I’d love to turn you on.” John revealed that Paul had that line “floating around in his head” for some time but hadn’t found a way to use it until The Beatles wrote “A Day in the Life.”
“A Day in the Life” is a classic track and Coyne was in awe of it.
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