The Beatles: Single By Single

I've always loved "Lady Madonna", though it is kind of an odd duck in their catalog. I remember being rather frustrated at my inability to find an original copy for years when I was a teenager. Since I wasn't willing to settle for a reissue, I had to settle for hoping it would come on the radio. Such is the price of being a purist, I guess.

I did eventually find one, which also allowed for me to finally hear "The Inner Light" after years of having only heard of it. I'm pretty sure it's the last Beatles song I heard for the first time, nearly a decade after I first became a big fan.

 

Actually, that's not a bad call. It would have been nice to have Rain sequenced after Good Day Sunshine.

 

The Inner Light


A-side: Lady Madonna
Single Released: 15 March 1968

In his autobiography, I, Me, Mine, George Harrison recalls that he was inspired to write "The Inner Light" by Juan Mascaró, a Sanskrit scholar at Cambridge University.[1][2] Mascaró had taken part in a debate, televised on The Frost Programme on 4 October 1967,[3] during which Harrison and John Lennon discussed the merits of Transcendental Meditation with an audience of academics and religious leaders.[4][5] In a subsequent letter to Harrison, dated 16 November, Mascaró expressed the hope that they might meet again before the Beatles departed for India,[6] where the group were to study meditation with their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.[7] Mascaró enclosed a copy of his book Lamps of Fire, an anthology of religious writings,[8] including from Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching.[9] Having stated his admiration for the spiritual message in Harrison's composition "Within You Without You",[10] Mascaró enquired: "might it not be interesting to put into your music a few words of Tao, for example no. 48, page 66 of Lamps?"[6][nb 1]

Harrison wrote the song during a period when he had undertaken his first musical project outside the Beatles, composing the soundtrack to the Joe Massot-directed film Wonderwall,[12][13] and continued to study the Indian sitar, partly under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar.[14][15] When writing "The Inner Light", he made minimal alterations to the translated Lao-Tzu text[2][16] and used the same title that Mascaró had used.[8]

After "Within You Without You", "The Inner Light" was the second composition to fully reflect Harrison's immersion in Eastern spiritual concepts, particularly meditation,[17][18] an interest that had spread to his Beatles bandmates[19][20] and to the group's audience and peers.[21][22] The lyrics espouse meditation as a means to genuine understanding.[23] Theologian Dale Allison describes the song as a "hymn" to quietism and comments that, in their attempt to "relativize and disparage knowledge of the external world", the words convey Harrison's enduring worldview.[24] Author John Winn notes that Harrison had pre-empted the message of "The Inner Light" in an August 1967 interview, when he told New York DJ Murray Kaufman: "The more you learn, the more you know that you don't know anything at all."[25] Writing in his study of Harrison's musical career, Ian Inglis similarly identifies a precedent in the song "It's All Too Much", where Harrison sings: "The more I learn, the less I know."[26]

References: Wikipedia

 

Possibly because there was no footage of Paul playing piano at the Hey Bulldog session and he wanted to be seen doing it for Lady Madonna? It's the only thing I can think of, tenuous though it may be.

 

"The Inner Light" is one of Harrison's best and even Paul praised the melody.

It's interesting that article reads "The Inner Light" was George's second song based on Eastern concepts ignoring "Love You To". Even "It's All Too Much" deals in ideas based on Eastern religions such as reincarnation.

 

Lady Madonna/The Inner Light

What I appreciate about this one is you get all three songwriters on a single. “Lady Madonna” is a great Lennon-McCartney collaboration (something that had become less common by this time), and “The Inner Light” is Harrison at his Indian-mystic best. Very different songs, seems like buyers were getting a lot for their money on this one.

 

I Am The Walrus

John himself admitted its "word salad" and it's melody is, indeed, a police siren. Why then does it work so well and is so endlessly fascinating? It is certainly the production and arrangement but its more than that. Perhaps my very favorite vocal moment from John is the "chooga chooga chooga" at the beginning of the coda. It just sounds like he is possessed.

Still hypnotic 50 years later.

Semolina pilchard, indeed.

 

Lady Madonna is not one of my favorite Beatle singles. Paul seems to really like it as its become a pretty standard part of his concert setlist. It's a good piece of craft but doesn't thrill me like the next single would.

 

The Inner Light - gotta say I am not a big fan of George's Eastern influenced compositions. I think that Eastern instruments used as atmosphere on Beatles songs is brilliant, but the tracks that are primarily Eastern instruments don't really speak to me. I don't look at 1967 as being a particularly strong year for George. Within You Without You, The Inner Light, Only A Northern Song & It's All Too Much. None of those songs can hold a candle to any of his White Album compositions, IMO.

 

I don’t know why but George’s Indian inspired songs really resonate with me.

Less so because of there Indian traits but more about the very personal and psychological writing

 

I'm actually surprised people think it doesn't make sense. It only doesn't make "sense" in the same way that, say, Come Together or Dig A Pony don't sense - until you realise each verse of Come Together is about a different Beatle or that Pony refers to heroin. Then the slightly surreal "world salad" does make sense. The lyric of Walrus seems to be a mass of self-loathing about his life as a Beatle basically. His feelings that they had sold-out to the mainstream, etc. Being miserable sitting in the English garden at Weybridge. Then there's the sexual Eggman reference to Eric Burden - something John apparently tried himself. Semolina pilchard being Norman Pilcher. The jibe at Hare Krishna. Obviously, it's all wilfully obscure as a deliberate joke, of course, but he's writing about himself in a surreal way and turning it into a kind of anti-establishment rallying cry. That's how I've always seen it any way!

 

Hi Bailes

Can you post an updated singles list chronology starting with the first one Love Me Do / P S I Love You

to our current/latest single?

Grazi

(I'll do it if you like)

 

Every book on the subject I have read claims that the last line of the song, "Do All Without Doing" features John and Paul singing harmonies. It sure doesn't sound like them to me. I think it's just George, triple-tracked. Does anybody else get that impression?

 

Not a huge fan of Lady Madonna, but it is a blast to play. Just worked it up with a horn section on Sat as - when you have a Horn section for a Beatles tribute, this is the most obvious one to do. Also using them on Got To Get You Into My Life (EW&F version), Let It Be, Hey Jude, Hey Bulldog (fattening guitar riff), and Yesterday (replacing strings as Paul did in 76).

Inner Light is the most enjoyable of Harrison's Indian tunes and probably my favorite thing he wrote since If I Needed Someone. Don't think I heard it until Rarities came out.

 

The Inner Light

A great B-side with no pretensions to be an A-side, which is a bit of relief in the Beatles power play.

I agree that you can't hear Paul or John at the end and yet their voices are usually pretty distinctive.

 

'Lady Madonna'/'The Inner Light':

The Beatles get back into a roots spirit even before the Get Back sessions, after the psychedelic extremes of the previous year. The song is a 'pro' single done by (by now) old hands. The flip side is one of my favorite George songs, a rather obscure obscure song.

The March 16, 1968 issue of Billboard describes the new Beatles single:



'Lady Madonna' will appear on the Billboard singles chart on March 23 at #23, rise to #9, #7, #6, and then top out at #4 for three weeks.

The March 30 Billboard chart finds 'The Inner Light' at #96, it's only appearance on the Hot 100 chart (while 'Lady Madonna' is at #9... #9):



The Billboard singles chart for the week ending April 27 has 'Lady Madonna' peaking at #4:

 

The Inner Light

George's raga songs are never in my thoughts when I feel like a Beatles dive but if I ever get the itch, this is the one I queue up. It's actually rather pretty and I'm more apt to want to hear it than the flip side. It deserved better than the low 90s but I suppose the fact that it even charted is a testament to the group's popularity. They literally could chart with anything.

 

I always felt that George adding guitar lick answers to Paul's vocal lines would have taken away from the beauty of the song's simplicity. I think the way those verses are arranged and played in Hey Jude is a perfect example of that old saying, "less is more". Far as AYNIL, I was one of those very young fans who was just old enough to really get that "feeling" out of a song that appealed to me but not quite old enough to analyze what I liked or didn't about a specific song. hence, at the time, whatever was done or used in a recording, I just accepted and grew up accepting it.

 

I've always thought The Inner Light was rather a bore.

 

"The Inner Light" was the last original Beatles song I ever heard (on BEATLES RARITIES). I like it a lot. As another poster said, a true B side, with no aspirations to being an A side.

 

The Inner Light is too good for a B side, in my opinion. They could've saved it for the White Album.

 

Where's the emoji to let us know that you're just kidding?
Cuz that's totally crazy.....

 

Exactly! The total absurdity of the lyrics and arrangement juxtaposed with the passionate manner John sings this song with has always fascinated me.

 

No.
What's crazy is people ranting about that theres some kind of greatness in nonsense lyrics about eggmen and sitting on a cornflake.

 

Why is that? The song is two and a half minutes......