Penny Lane

"Penny Lane" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as a double A-side single with "Strawberry Fields Forever" in February 1967. It was written primarily by Paul McCartney and credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. The lyrics refer to Penny Lane, a street in Liverpool, and make mention of the sights and characters that McCartney recalled from his upbringing in the city.
The Beatles began recording "Penny Lane" in December 1966, intending it as a song for their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Instead, after it was issued as a single to satisfy record company demand for a new release, the band adhered to their policy of omitting previously released singles from their albums. The song features numerous modulations that occur mid-verse and between its choruses. Session musician David Mason played a piccolo trumpet solo for its bridge section.
"Penny Lane" was a top-five hit across Europe and topped the US Billboard Hot 100. In Britain, it was the first Beatles single since "Please Please Me" in 1963 to fail to reach number 1 on the Record Retailer chart. In November 1967, "Penny Lane" was included on the US Magical Mystery Tour album. In 2021, Rolling Stone ranked the track at number 280 on its list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". In 2006, Mojo ranked the song at number 9 of "The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs".
In 2011, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Background and inspiration

is a road in the south Liverpool suburb of Mossley Hill. The name also applies to the area surrounding its junction with Smithdown Road and Allerton Road, and to the roundabout at Smithdown Place that was the location for a major bus terminus, originally an important tram junction of Liverpool Corporation Tramways. The roundabout was a frequent stopping place for John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison during their years as schoolchildren and students. Bus journeys via Penny Lane and the area itself subsequently became familiar elements in the early years of the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. In 2009, McCartney reflected:
Lennon's original lyrics for "In My Life" had included a reference to Penny Lane. Soon after the Beatles recorded "In My Life" in October 1965, McCartney mentioned to an interviewer that he wanted to write a song about Penny Lane. A year later, he was spurred to write the song once presented with Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever". McCartney also cited Dylan Thomas's nostalgic poem "Fern Hill" as an inspiration for "Penny Lane". Lennon co-wrote the lyrics with McCartney. He recalled in a 1970 interview: "The bank was, and was where the tram sheds were and people waiting and the inspector stood, the fire engines were down. It was reliving childhood."
Writing for the song took place early in the sessions for what became the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, which commenced following a three-month period when the Beatles had pursued individual interests. Beatles biographer Ian MacDonald suggested an LSD influence, saying that the lyrical imagery points to McCartney first taking LSD in late 1966. MacDonald concluded that the lyric "And though she feels as if she's in a play / She is anyway" was one of the more "LSD-redolent phrases" in the Beatles' catalogue. Music critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler similarly described the subject matter as "essentially 'Liverpool-on-a-sunny-hallucinogenic-afternoon'".

Composition

Music

"Penny Lane" begins in the key of B major and is in common time throughout. The song comprises three rounds of two verses and a chorus, with the chorus repeated during the final round. In its melody, the composition has a double tonic structure of B major verse and A major chorus connected by formal pivoting dominant chords. In the opening bars in B major, after singing "In Penny Lane" McCartney sings the major third of the first chord in the progression and major seventh then switches to a Bm chord, singing the flattened third notes and flattened seventh notes. Musicologist Dominic Pedler describes this as a profound and surprising innovation involving abandoning mid-cycle what initially appears to be a standard I–vi–ii–V doo-wop pop chord cycle.
The song features contrasting verse–chorus form. To get from the verse "In the pouring rain – very strange" McCartney uses an E chord as a pivot, to take listeners back into the chorus. Likewise to get back from the chorus of "There beneath the blue suburban skies I sit, and meanwhile back ...", McCartney uses an F⁷ pivot chord, which is a VI in the old A key and a V in the new B key. The lyrics "very strange" and "meanwhile back" reflect these tonal shifts.

Lyrics

Lyrically there are several ambiguous and surreal images. The song is seemingly narrated on a fine summer day, yet at the same time it is raining and approaching winter. MacDonald stated: "Seemingly naturalistic, the lyric scene is actually kaleidoscopic. As well as raining and shining at the same time, it is simultaneously summer and winter." The fireman and fire engine referred to in the lyrics were based on memories of the fire station at Mather Avenue, while the barber shop was Bioletti's, where McCartney, Harrison and Lennon each had their hair cut as children. The line "A four of fish and finger pies" is British slang. "A four of fish" refers to fourpennyworth of fish and chips, while "finger pie" is sexual slang for fingering.
According to music critic and musicologist Wilfrid Mellers, writing in his 1973 book Twilight of the Gods: "For both musical and verbal reasons, the song comes out as childishly merry yet dreamily wild at the same time. The hallucinatory feeling concerns problems of identity rather than drugs specifically, asking what, among our childhood memories, is reality and what is illusion."

Production

Main recording

Production began in Studio 2 at EMI Studios on 29 December 1966 with piano as the main instrument. McCartney intended the song to have a "clean" sound akin to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album. Engineer Geoff Emerick recalled McCartney playing Pet Sounds repeatedly during recording session breaks, adding that "it wasn't altogether unsurprising he wanted 'a really clean American sound'" for "Penny Lane". Initially, McCartney recorded keyboard parts onto the individual tracks of the four-track tape: a basic piano rhythm on track one; a second piano, recorded through a Vox guitar amplifier with added reverb, on track two; a prepared piano producing a "honky-tonk" sound on track three; and percussion effects and a harmonium playing high notes fed through the guitar amplifier on track four. On 30 December, the four tracks were mixed together to form the first track of a new tape.
On 4 January 1967, the Beatles' first session of the new year, Lennon and Harrison overdubbed contributions on piano and lead guitar, respectively, and McCartney added a lead vocal, which he then replaced the following day. Further overdubs, on 6 January, included Ringo Starr's drums, McCartney's bass guitar and Lennon's rhythm guitar, as well as handclaps, congas, harmony vocals and more piano. Following another reduction mix, brass and woodwind instruments, including four flutes, were added on 9 and 12 January, from a score by producer George Martin, guided by McCartney's suggested melody lines. On 10 January, the Beatles overdubbed effects such as scat harmony singing and a handbell, the latter in recognition of the fireman and fire engine mentioned in the lyrics. The second overdubbing session for the classical instrumentation, on 12 January, featured two further trumpets, two oboes, two cors anglais and a double bass.

Piccolo trumpet solo

McCartney was dissatisfied with the initial attempts at the song's instrumental fill, and was inspired to use a piccolo trumpet after seeing trumpeter David Mason play the instrument during a BBC television broadcast of the second Brandenburg Concerto by Johann Sebastian Bach. On 17 January, Mason recorded the instrumental solo used for the final mix. Martin later wrote, "The result was unique, something which had never been done in rock music before." The solo is in a mock-Baroque style for which the piccolo trumpet is particularly suited, having a clean and clear sound which penetrates well through thicker midrange textures. According to Emerick, Mason "nailed it" at some point during the recording; McCartney tried to get him to do another take but Martin insisted it was not necessary, sensing Mason's fatigue. He also played over the song's final chorus, replacing the oboe parts from that portion of the track.
Mason later said he was impressed that Lennon, Harrison and Starr were present at the session, demonstrating a common interest in shaping the result, although he was taken aback by their new look of moustaches and psychedelic clothing. Mason was paid £27 and 10 shillings for the session and achieved international renown for his performance. In author Mark Hertsgaard's description, the trumpet solo is the recording's "pièce de résistance" and evokes a "sense of freedom, energy, and sheer happiness". Author Jonathan Gould describes the sound as "impossibly high and bright", and says that the solo represents a "neo-Baroque pastiche of every fanfare ever blown" and casts a magical spell that allows the Beatles to insert the risqué "Four of fish and finger pies" line into the chorus that follows. Classical music scholar Barry Millington described Mason's contribution as "surreal, unearthly... a fusion of classical and rock" and commented that "so high does the part go", it was mistakenly assumed to have been sped up after recording.