Song Lyrics
“Norwegian Wood” is track #7 on the album Rubber Soul (Remastered).
It was written by Lennon John Winston; Mc Cartney Paul.
“Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”
She showed me her room, isn’t it good, norwegian wood?She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chairI sat on the rug, biding my time, drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said, “It’s time for bed”She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bathAnd when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, norwegian wood?
Paul McCartney: harmony vocals, bass
George Harrison: sitar, 12-string acoustic guitar
Ringo Starr: bass drum, tambourine
Norwegian Wood was a landmark recording for The Beatles, being one of the first Western pop songs to feature the sitar, an Indian instrument.
John Lennon had the idea for the song while on a skiing holiday with his wife Cynthia, in St Moritz in the Swiss Alps. They were joined by George Martin, who injured himself early on in the holiday, and his future wife Judy Lockhart-Smith.
It was during this time that John was writing songs for Rubber Soul, and one of the songs he composed in the hotel bedroom, while we were all gathered around, nursing my broken foot, was a little ditty he would play to me on his acoustic guitar. The song was Norwegian Wood.
The song demonstrated the continuing influence of Bob Dylan upon The Beatles’ music. Dylan himself responded with 4th Time Around on 1966’s Blonde On Blonde album, which shares a similar melody and lyrical theme.
Norwegian Wood was about an extra-marital relationship Lennon was having at the time. His friend Pete Shotton later suggested that the woman in question was a journalist – possibly Maureen Cleave, a close friend to Lennon.
Norwegian Wood is my song completely. It was about an affair I was having. I was very careful and paranoid because I didn’t want my wife, Cyn, to know that there really was something going on outside of the household. I’d always had some kind of affairs going, so I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair, but in such a smoke-screen way that you couldn’t tell. But I can’t remember any specific woman it had to do with.
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
Although begun in Switzerland, Norwegian Wood was completed as a collaboration between Lennon and Paul McCartney. Talking to Rolling Stone in 1970, Lennon attributed the middle section to McCartney, although in a 1980 interview with Playboy he called it “my song completely”.
I came in and he had this first stanza, which was brilliant: ‘I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.’ That was all he had, no title, no nothing. I said, ‘Oh yes, well, ha, we’re there.’ And it wrote itself. Once you’ve got the great idea, they do tend to write themselves, providing you know how to write songs. So I picked it up at the second verse, it’s a story. It’s him trying to pull a bird, it was about an affair. John told Playboy that he hadn’t the faintest idea where the title came from but I do. Peter Asher had his room done out in wood, a lot of people were decorating their places in wood. Norwegian wood. It was pine really, cheap pine. But it’s not as good a title, Cheap Pine, baby…So she makes him sleep in the bath and then finally in the last verse I had this idea to set the Norwegian wood on fire as revenge, so we did it very tongue in cheek. She led him on, then said, ‘You’d better sleep in the bath’. In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn’t the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn’t, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental. beatlesbible.com
Paul McCartney
By the fall of 1965, The Beatles and George Martin had come to regard the recording studio as a place to experiment, think outside the box and slowly pull away from their tried-and-true formulas.
On October 12 of that year, they did just that, recording a brilliant new John Lennon composition inspired by a clandestine affair he was having at the time. The recording would feature an exciting new tool, George Harrison’s sitar.
The exotic stringed instrument wasn’t new only to Harrison and The Beatles, but to all of pop music — although an unreleased early version of The Yardbirds’ June 1965 single, “Heart Full of Soul,” features a sitar, and The Kinks’ “See My Friends,” released in July, is clearly raga-inspired, with the guitar calling to mind the sound and timbre of a sitar. Perhaps British recording engineers hadn’t had very rewarding sitar experiences in the past.
“It was very hard to record [the sitar] because it has a lot of nasty peaks and a very complex wave form,” said EMI engineer Norman Smith. “My meter would be going right over into the red, into distortion, without us getting audible value for money.” guitarworld.com