"Because" is a song written by John Lennon and recorded by the English rock bandthe Beatles. It was released on their 1969 album Abbey Road, immediately preceding the extended medleyon side two of the record. It features a prominent three-part vocal harmony by Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, recorded three times to make nine voices in all.
Composition
The song begins with a distinctive electric harpsichord intro played by producer George Martin. The harpsichord is joined by Lennon's guitar played through a Leslie speaker. Then vocals and bass guitar enter. "Because" was one of few Beatles recordings to feature a Moog synthesiser, played by George Harrison. It appears in what Alan Pollack refers to as the "mini-bridge", and then again at the end of the song. According to Lennon, the song's close musical resemblance to the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven'sMoonlight Sonata was no coincidence: "Yoko was playing Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' on the piano... I said, 'Can you play those chords backwards?', and wrote 'Because' around them. The lyrics speak for themselves... No imagery, no obscure references."
Musical structure
With regard to the controversy Lennon initiated by citing Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" as an inspiration, musicologist Walter Everett notes that "both arpeggiate triads and seventh chords in C minor in the baritone range of a keyboard instrument at a slow tempo, move through the submediant to II and approach viidim7/IV via a common tone." But while acknowledging the unusual shared harmonies, Dominic Pedler notes that the relationship is not the result of reversing the order of the chords as Lennon suggested. "Because" concludes with a vocal fade-out on Ddim, which keeps listeners in suspense as they wait for the return to the home key of C minor. Mellers states that: "causality is released and there is no before and no after: because that flat supertonic is a moment of revelation, it needs no resolution." The Ddim chord lingers until they resolve into the opening Am7 chord of "You Never Give Me Your Money".
Recording
George Martin on "Because": The main recording session for "Because" was on 1 August 1969, with vocal overdubs on 4 August, and a double-tracked Moog synthesiser overdub by Harrison on 5 August. As a result, this was the last song on the album to be committed to tape, although there were still overdubs for other incomplete songs. This approach took extensive rehearsal, and more than five hours of extremely focused recording, to capture correctly. McCartney and Harrison both said it was their favourite track on Abbey Road. "They knew they were doing something special," said engineer Geoff Emerick, "and they were determined to get it right." A remixed version of the song, with the instrumentation removed so as to highlight the three-part harmony by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, was released on 1996's Anthology 3 and, in a different remix, on 2006's Love. In 2016, the Anthology 3 mix became the first recording by The Beatles to appear in a film trailer when it was featured in the trailer for Luc Besson's film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
