The True Story Behind “Norwegian Wood”
Cummings Archives/Getty ImagesCynthia Lennon and John Lennon in 1964.
“Norwegian Wood” has an edge. The romantic, sexually charged ballad ends with the singer burning down a girl’s house. Included on The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul, it showed that the Fab Four were capable of much more than boppy love songs.
The song also showed — upon examination — that John Lennon had started to step out on his wife, Cynthia.
“It was about an affair I was having,” Lennon later confirmed. “I was very careful and paranoid because I didn’t want my wife, Cyn, to know that there really was something going on outside of 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 smoke-screen way that you couldn’t tell.”
To conceal the truth, Lennon twisted facts with fiction. He wrote about an encounter with a girl who brought him home but made him sleep in the bathtub — so he burned her house down.
“I was trying to write about an affair without letting my wife know I was writing about an affair,” Lennon elaborated. “So it was very gobbledegook.”
But “Norwegian Wood” doesn’t only stand out for its surprising content. The song is also the first Beatles song to use the sitar, an instrument that had recently enchanted George Harrison.
Harrison first encountered the sitar on the set of The Beatles movie Help!. Although the instrument was just part of the set, Harrison picked it up and liked how it sounded. He later developed a relationship with sitar player Ravi Shankar, who taught him how to play the instrument.
YouTubeRavi Shankar and George Harrison playing the sitar in 1968.
And when it came to “Norwegian Wood,” Harrison had an inspired idea that would change The Beatles’ sound forever.
“We’d recorded the Norwegian Wood backing track and it needed something,” Harrison later recalled.
“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.”
Indeed, Harrison would later admit that he barely knew how to play the sitar. (And Shankar would call “Norwegian Wood” “so strange.”) But the inclusion of the sitar added new dimensions to The Beatles’ music and frequently appeared on their albums over the years.
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