I Want You (She's So Heavy)

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I Want You (She's So Heavy)
The Beatles
publication 26th September 1969
length 7 min 47 s
Genre (s) Blues rock
Author (s) Lennon / McCartney
album Abbey Road

I Want You (She's So Heavy) ( English I need you [It's great] ) is a song by British band The Beatles in 1969. It was written by John Lennon , but is usual with the band under the Copyright Lennon / McCartney .

background

The song, which is over seven minutes long, repeats the line “I want you. I want you so bad. I want you. It's driving me mad ”, which is sung over a melody played in many variations. In terms of content, Lennon describes his love for his wife Yoko Ono in just 15 words in the song .

admission

Still under the working title I Want You , the first versions of the song were made during the recording sessions for the album Let it Be at the end of January 1969, and they remained unpublished.

Shortly after work on the album Let It Be was completed, the Beatles began recording I Want You (She's So Heavy) on February 22, 1969 . Together they recorded 35 takes of the song at Trident Studios in London , from which a version was cut from Take 9, 20 and 32 the following day, which the band continued to work on.

On April 18, 1969, John Lennon and George Harrison recorded the incisive guitars for the song's finale . Congas and a Hammond organ followed on April 20, 1969 . After that there was no further work on the song for almost four months.

Work on I Want You (She's So Heavy) continued on the day that the famous photo was taken of the Beatles crossing the zebra crossing on Abbey Road . On August 8, 1969, Lennon added a Moog synthesizer for the finale , which also generated the noise that can be heard in the finale with increasing volume. The last recordings took place on August 11, 1969: John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison sang backing vocals twice for the finale.

On August 20, 1969, the recordings from April and August 1969 were cut and mixed together. The song had a total length of 8:04 minutes. Lennon decided against ending the song with a fade-out , but instructed the sound engineer to simply cut the tape just before the end of the song, so that the song ended abruptly at 7:47 minutes. This August 20, 1969 was the last time the four Beatles were together in a recording studio. Only a photo session and a business meeting followed, which the four attended together.

publication

I Want You (She's So Heavy) appeared on the album Abbey Road on September 26, 1969 and is the last song on page 1, so that side of the album ends abruptly. A discarded title order of the album stipulated, among other things, that page 1 and page 2 would have been swapped, so that I Want You (She's So Heavy) would have been the last song on the album.

Cover versions

Numerous cover versions of the song have appeared to the present day , including a version by Alvin Lee on which George Harrison played slide guitar . An instrumental version of the song by the Groove Collective formation , which was also released as a single, made it into the US Billboard charts in 1996 . The Swiss band Coroner released a metal version in 1991 . The band Beatallica recorded a mashup with the Metallica song The Call of Ktulu in 2007 under the title Ktulu (He's So Heavy) .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ^ Mark Lewisohn: The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions . Hamlyn, London 1988.
  3. ↑ [2]