"Tomorrow Never Knows"
When John Lennon wrote “Tomorrow Never Knows,” he ventured into entirely new creative territory. His inspiration came from The Psychedelic Experience, the manual on how to use LSD by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, itself an adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Determined to capture the sound of transcendence ego death or depersonalization that is commonly experienced under the influence of psychedelic drugs, Lennon opened the song with a line lifted directly from the text: “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.” He later described the track as “almost the first acid song,” rooted in his own early encounters with LSD. The song appears as the final track on Revolver, although it was the first song recorded for the LP.
Musical Elements
Musically, the recording marked a decisive break from pop convention, drawing on techniques more often associated with the avant-garde—musique concrète, experimental composition, and electro-acoustic sound manipulation. Built on a static C drone rather than chord progressions, the song adopted a modal structure derived from Indian classical music. George Harrison’s tambura supplied a continuous resonance, while Paul McCartney’s bass reinforced the tonal center. Ringo Starr contributed one of his most distinctive drum patterns: steady, hypnotic, and entirely removed from standard rock backbeats. To heighten the effect, Lennon’s voice was processed through a Leslie speaker cabinet, creating the swirling, disembodied sound he had requested from producer George Martin to sound “like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop.”
What ultimately propelled “Tomorrow Never Knows” beyond anything heard in popular music before was its pioneering use of tape loops. The Beatles created fragments of sound—birdlike cries, orchestral snippets, reversed guitar figures—and fed them live into the studio mix, layering and reshaping them at the mixing console. Borrowed from avant-garde practice, this technique replaced harmonic motion with evolving timbre and texture. The result was a sonic environment that seemed to hover outside time, producing one of the most radical musical experiments of the 1960s.
Harmonically, the song sits in C Mixolydian, occasionally shaded by B-flat inflections in the melodic lines and tape-loop textures. Musicologist Peter Lavezzoli has identified it as the first pop song to dispense with formal chord changes altogether, though subtle shifts emerge in Lennon’s vocal contours.
The foundation of the track is a drone on C, reinforced by Paul McCartney’s bass and George Harrison’s tambura. This establishes a tonic area (I) that persists almost without interruption. However, in measure five the organ briefly articulates B♭, creating the effect of a B♭ chord sounding over the sustained C pedal (bVII/I). This sonority lasts for two measures before the texture resolves back to the tonic. While the organ part is not notated in the transcription, the harmonic outline can be represented as follows:
C / / / | C / / / | C / / / | C / / / |
(I / / / | I / / / | I / / / | I / / / |)
B♭/C / / / | B♭/C / / / | C / / / | C ///|
(♭VII/I / / / | ♭VII/I / / / | I / / / | I///|)
Despite the experimental sound world and avant-garde studio techniques, the song retains a relatively conventional formal design. The verses unfold in standard eight-bar phrases, grounding the radical timbres and textures within a familiar structural framework. The following analysis will cover the first verse starting at 0:12.