One of the best examples of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison's harmonizing -- Because. I've long considered tattooing a verse from this onto my arm as I've always thought it fit me so well.
As a side note -- and perhaps something you didn't know about me -- I experience what's called Stendhal syndrome; a psychosomatic illness which can cause rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and can even cause hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art/music, usually when it is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world. There's a moment in this song where the harmony is so perfect to my ears that when I listen to it with headphones on it actually makes me gasp and it fills me with this strong urge to smile and cry at once. While I've never fainted or gotten particularly confused, I have (on several occasions) burst into uncontrollable tears, lost my breath, and have definitely felt dizzy and overwhelmed -- and on one occasion I nearly vomited. I've found the affliction to be embarrassing most of the time -- you try watching movies with friends when at any moment you could just burst into tears or get dizzy and fall over! Always makes me feel like such a girl when I crank up the volume to a great tune and I get all choked up at beautiful notes or complex bridges. But the weird part is that I don't just get this way with traditionally 'beautiful' songs -- it can happen to me with perfectly executed rap verses, perfectly pitched squealy guitar in hair metal, and key changes in 80's dance songs. Technically beautiful things choke me up too. Just recently I teared up at a perfect mashup of Kei$ha's 'Tik Tok' and Vanilla Ice's 'Ice Ice Baby' -- no joke -- I cried at the smooth transition.
The song begins with electric harpsichord played by George Martin and then joined by Lennon's guitar doubling the harpsichord and played through a Leslie speaker. Vocals and bass guitar enter in what Alan Pollack calls the "mini-bridge." The song was one of the few Beatles songs to include an analog synthesizer arrangement (although analog keyboards such as the Mellotron had been used often by The Beatles, few songs featured the use of a traditional analog synthesizer with voltage-controlled oscillators).
The Beatles at the time of Abbey Road were among the first contemporary rock bands to experiment with the Moog synthesizer (the first, or at least the first to chart on the top 40, had been The Monkees). According to Lennon, "Because" was inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata". "Yoko was playing Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' on the piano ... I said, 'Can you play those chords backwards?', and wrote 'Because' around them. The lyrics speak for themselves ... No imagery, no obscure references."
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