Strawberry Fields Forever — The Beatles
Perhaps their biggest and most iconic song, Strawberry Fields Forever was a meditation on his childhood, and the feeling that he was alone “in his tree.”
Lennon said: “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 chorus, with the “let me take you down” line, was not initially intended to start off the song. It was written later, as he remembered back to the orphanage, Strawberry Fields, that he used to pass all the time in Liverpool. He’d go to the yearly Salvation Army carnival there, and always had a certain interest in the place and playing with its children. When his Aunt Mimi warned him against it, he told her, “they can’t hang you for it” — thus, “nothing to get hung about.”
It started out as an acoustic Lennon piece before becoming the “hazy, impressionistic dreamworld” that producer George Martin would term its final version.
