| One of the best examples of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison's harmonizing, Because. The song begins with electric harpsichord played by George Martin and then joined by Lennon's guitar doubling the harpsichord and played through a Leslie speaker. Vocals and bass guitar enter in what Alan Pollack calls the "mini-bridge." The song was one of the few Beatles songs to include an analog synthesizer arrangement (although analog keyboards such as the Mellotron had been used often by The Beatles, few songs featured the use of a traditional analog synthesizer with voltage-controlled oscillators). The Beatles at the time of Abbey Road were among the first contemporary rock bands to experiment with the Moog synthesizer (the first, or at least the first to chart on the top 40, had been The Monkees). According to Lennon, "Because" was inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata". "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." The main recording session for "Because" was on 1 August 1969, with vocal overdubs on 4 August, and a Moog synthesizer overdub by George 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. A vocals-only version of the song can be found on Anthology 3 and Love and ... |
