"Flying"

Magical Myster Tour, 1967

"A Day in the Life" may be the best pop song ever recorded, but "Flying" has been my favorite Beatles song for a long time. Many Beatles fans are not even aware of the brief instrumental sandwiched in the middle of 1967's Magical Mystery Tour, the band's slightly less-loved follow up to the legendary Sgt Pepper. Part continuation of Pepper, part soundtrack to a movie no one except Paul McCartney was interested in making (which directly lead to an animation studio fully producing the content for their final contracted film, Yellow Submarine) Magical Mystery Tour contains several classic Beatles cuts like "I am the Walrus", "Strawberry Fields", "Hello Goodbye", "All You Need is Love", but was never thought of as the complete thought that Sgt Pepper was since it was essentially an EP (in the UK) with some previously released singles used to pad it to a full album (in the US). It was well-received at the time, but has never really received the acclaim that Sgt Pepper, Abbey Road, Revolver, and Rubber Soul have because it is a bit of a patchwork of (great) ideas.

The Beatles themselves didn't seem to know what to do with the song "Flying". In the years since the album was released several alternate versions have surfaced. Two of them are more common; the first is relatively similar to the final product, albeit looser and with some odd whistling effects. The second clocks in at 9 minutes, most of it being extended trippy noise similar to the outro. I wanted to expand the tune slightly, but without dragging it out - part of the song's charm is its brevity. I stretched it from 3 verses to 5, and brought the bass up an octave to add some warmth to the acoustic setting, though in doing so it lost a pit of the trance-inducing pulse.

Since it is a relatively obscure Beatles tune, "Flying" hasn't been covered as much as, well, pretty much every other Beatles song. But it is still a Beatles tune, so there are a few oddball covers that have been released over the years. Beatles covers can be dicey, for every "With a Little Help From My Friends" by Joe Cocker or Wilson Pickett's "Hey Jude", there are 100 painful "Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" by the BeeGees or any whispy-voiced college girl with a guitar singing "Across the Universe". This is apparent on Julie Taymor's ambitious Across the Universe 2007 film, which features such failures as Eddie Izzard's rendition of "Benefit for Mr Kite". However, there is a gem of a cover from that film, The Secret Machines take on "Flying". They successfully stretched the song out, mostly using keyboards, expanding on the original while still adhering to what makes "Flying" a great song. It's a good blueprint for covering the Beatles - respect the original, make it your own, but don't take it too seriously.

I suppose it is fitting that immediately after covering The Rolling Stones I'd pick a Beatles tune. It wasn't done on purpose, I have a couple of songs loosely put together at the moment, I only noticed after I'd posted them together.