John Lennon wrote the song in September 1966 while in Spain while filming How I Won the War.
For the first time in years he had left the daily Beatles business behind and used the freedom to dig deep into his childhood memories. In 1968 he told ROLLING STONE: “We wanted to do a song about Liverpool and I listed the euphonious names of the city. In the case of Strawberry Fields, associations came up because it can ultimately be any place you wish to be.”
Strawberry Field (the “s” is from Lennon) was a children’s home, very close to his Aunt Mimi’s house where Lennon grew up. Discarded by his parents to live with his aunt, young Lennon would often climb over the orphanage wall to play in the overgrown garden.
“In kindergarten, the others thought I was cool,” Lennon said in 1980. “I’ve been different my whole life. The second verse says: ‘No one I think is in my tree.’ What I wanted to say: Nobody seemed to be as popular as I was. So I had to be either crazy or a genius. Then the next line: ‘I mean it must be high or low’: There must be something wrong with me, I thought to myself, because I was seeing things that other people obviously weren’t seeing.”
After finishing the song on a Spanish beach, he returned to England and introduced it to the band. Recording engineer Geoff Emerick recalls, “There was complete silence for a moment, until Paul, impressed, said, ‘That’s brilliant.'” Up to that point, the song was an acoustic ballad vaguely reminiscent of Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” “ reminded. But in the studio, after the Beatles had experimented for days, he developed a life of his own. Having said goodbye to live performance months earlier, the four now had the leisure to hone the song and try out multiple versions over the next two weeks. McCartney composed the intro on a mellotron, the forerunner of the synthesizer.
Surreal timelessness
Lennon wanted to combine different recordings – despite the fact that they had different tempos and keys. Producer George Martin solved the problem by slightly speeding up one and slowing down the other – enhancing the eerie tone of Lennon’s voice and lending the song an air of surreal timelessness. The final version ends with the excerpt of a longer jam session, during which Lennon once says “cranberry sauce”. The “Paul is Dead” weirdos would later hear “I buried Paul” in it.
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“Strawberry Fields” was the first recording of the “Sgt. Pepper” sessions. The unexpected possibilities of the new studio technology, which also benefited the other Liverpool reminiscence – McCartney’s “Penny Lane” – opened up new possibilities. The LSD-inspired, somnambulistic lyrics also seemed to open a new chapter. The two tracks were supposed to be the centerpiece of the forthcoming album, but with EMI demanding a new single (the last one was six months old), both songs were released in February 1967 as a “double A-side” single.
The decision to combine the two tracks from the “Sgt. Pepper” context, George Martin later described as “the biggest mistake of my entire career”.