8/8/26
strawberry is my jam
Where my music theory heads at? I'm doing a quick harmonic breakdown of "Strawberry Fields Forever" by the Beatles. I'm putting it here for now, but future music-related analyses may have their own page.
The first thing to note about this song is the key, which in the released recording is roughly A half-sharp major. This wasn't an deliberate decision, but rather the product of having two separate recordings (acoustic and orchestral) at different tempos and pitch centers. George Martin used varispeed to stitch the 2 recordings together, and the resulting pitch center happened to be a microtone.
The song has a brief instrumental intro, but, interestingly, it skips the verse and jumps straight into the chorus. Though this is the case, I want to start with the harmony of the verse.
(I'm using scale degree notation rather than pitch names to focus on relative change and avoid confusion.)
verse
Nothing too crazy. All diatonic chords, and a decent amount of stepwise motion in the bass to keep it smooth. Now, how about the chorus?
chorus
It took me a while to get these chords right because they're so unexpected, yet they work so well. Starting from the tonic (I) we go to the minor dominant chord (v). This unexpected minor shift combined with Lennon singing the ascending major melody "Straw-ber-ry fields" is a beautiful use of contrasting elements, and I think it's really at the core of what gives the song a nostalgic feel. Then he does something similar in the next line, where we move to the major VI chord (which is another departure from the expected vi). Over this chord, Lennon sings the ascending minor melody "Noth-ing is real," which keeps the major/minor twist and also creates a moment of darkness. But we immediately spring back into the light, as there's "noth-ing to get hung about." We move from IV to VI in a line that carries positive momentum and prepares the chorus to end on an optimistic note. Then, we resolve everything with a IV - I movement. Overall, I think the chorus is really what defines this song and gives it its characteristic bittersweetness.
Despite the song being over 4 minutes long, the harmony is pretty much just these two parts repeated. And I don't blame them. Harmony this good deserves to have some time to soak in.