Tomorrow Never Knows
The Beatles, Revolver, 1966
Before anything else, there is the drone.
Deep purple. Not circles. Two rectangles, wide and low, sitting in the space before the song has fully decided to begin. They pulse. Slowly, steadily, the way something pulses when it has been doing this since before you arrived and will continue long after you leave. The purple is dark at its center, almost bruised, and the two shapes breathe against each other, expanding slightly on each pulse, contracting, never fully still, never fully moving.
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Then the drums arrive.
Deep amber, steady and pulsing, warm like a low light beating in the background. Not a color that demands attention. A color that holds everything else up. It establishes itself immediately as the floor of the song, a glowing gold that keeps moving without ever appearing to rush.
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Then the tape loops arrive and the world opens.
Smoky blue, silver, gray. Never fixed, never still. They fold into one another the way clouds fold, the way smoke moves through a room with no windows. Shapes that begin to form and then release before they finish forming. The song becomes expansive because of them, slightly disorienting, as if the colors themselves have forgotten how to settle.
Beneath all of it, the bass. Deep green and shadowy blue, dense rather than bright, a shaded line running underneath everything else. Not something you look at. Something you lean against.
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John Lennon’s voice carries the strongest color of all.
Lemon yellow. Sharp, bright, slightly sour at the edges. Each time it enters it moves immediately to the foreground, cutting through the smoke and the amber and the deep green the way sudden sunlight cuts through everything that was there before it. The voice does not share space. It claims it.
The guitar arrives differently. Pale white threaded with silver and faint blue, thinner, more electric, adding a flickering motion to the edges of everything. It flashes like reflected light across moving water. Present without overtaking. Alive without insisting.
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What this song produces is not a color.
It is an entire world of colors moving endlessly around one another. The amber drums hold the center. The smoky loops drift at the edges. The deep green bass runs beneath. The pale guitar flickers across the surface. And the lemon yellow of that voice rises through all of it, sharp and clear, the one thing that never dissolves.
When the song ends they do not fade one by one.
They release together. The whole world at once.
Adrian Adair