I'll Follow the Sun

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Recording

• One of the very early songs, held back for years — Paul puts I’ll Follow the Sun among the songs written long before the group had a recording contract: “‘I’ll Follow The Sun’ was one of those very early ones. I seem to remember writing it just after I’d had the flu” — sitting with a guitar, “looking out through the lace curtains of the window, and writing that one”. It stayed unrecorded because it did not fit the band the city knew: with a leather-clad rock-and-roll and R&B image to keep up, “ballads like that, got pushed back to later”.¹
• Recorded in one long Sunday, takes 1–8 — the song was cut on 18 October 1964, Studio Two, 2.30–11.30pm, in the most crowded session of the Beatles for Sale run: Eight Days a Week, Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!, Mr. Moonlight, I Feel Fine, Words of Love and more were all worked on the same day. George Martin produced, Norman Smith engineered, and the second engineer was Geoff Emerick. Eight takes, with “the ‘best’ version being take eight”.¹
• Take 8 is the take that gained the guitar solo — the arrangement changed on the last attempt: “This take was the first to feature a lead guitar solo in the middle eight, a point in previous takes preserved for an acoustic guitar break.” Everything before take 8 kept the middle eight acoustic. The electric solo on the record is therefore a late decision taken inside the session, not a plan carried into it.¹
• The drum kit was tried and abandoned — on the day, nobody could find a part for Ringo: “At first, they couldn’t think of anything for Ringo to do—he played drums on a run-through, but it sounded all wrong, too aggressive…” After a good deal of discussion, Paul came up with the idea of having Ringo just slap his legs in time, “and that worked well”.³
• How the leg-slapping was recorded — Norman Smith carefully positioned a mic between Ringo’s knees; then, back in the control room, “he cranked up the EQ to add some extra depth to the sound”. The equalisation was used to give the slap body, not sparkle — without it the sound is a dry pat with nothing underneath it.³
• The harmony was written in the control room — the second voice is not a band arrangement: the low harmony line was one George Martin had contrived for John “to sing in perfect” complement to Paul’s lead. A producer writing a vocal line, on a song the composer had carried around since his teens, is the division of labour of this period in miniature.³
• The four-track layout is documented, not deduced — this song is one of the 1964 track sheets reproduced from surviving documentation, so its tape allocation is on record rather than inferred: Track 1 acoustic guitar and drums; Track 2 electric guitar; Track 3 vocals; Track 4 guitar solo. The solo has a whole track to itself, which is what made it possible to add on the last take without disturbing anything already down.²
• The machine is on record too — Abbey Road ran two four-tracks in adjacent tape rooms, Room 1B holding the Telefunken M10 and Room 1A the T9U. I’ll Follow the Sun is named, with Eight Days a Week and I Feel Fine, among the songs “all recorded to the” M10 in 1964 — the newer of the pair.²

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 18 October 1964 (Sun) — recording, takes 1–8, Studio Two, 2.30–11.30pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Geoff Emerick. Nine hours, and this was one song among many: the same block produced Eight Days a Week edit takes 14–15, Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey! takes 1–2, a re-make of Mr. Moonlight at takes 5–8, plus I Feel Fine, Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby, Rock and Roll Music and Words of Love. Most of those were rock-and-roll covers knocked off in one or two takes; this song took eight. Take 8 was marked ‘best’ and is the source of every issued mix. Two things were settled here that the earlier takes had not settled: the middle eight went from an acoustic break to an electric solo, and the drum kit gave way to leg-slapping after a run-through with the kit “sounded all wrong, too aggressive”.^1,3
• 21 October 1964 (Wed) — mono mixing, from take 8, Room 65, 2.30–5.45pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ron Pender. The mono was made three days after the recording, and not in a studio control room at all but in Room 65 — the block opened with four separate mono remixes of I Feel Fine before reaching this song, and also took in Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby. There was no second attempt: unlike several of its album-mates, this song’s first mono remix is the one that shipped.¹
• 4 November 1964 (Wed) — stereo mixing, from take 8, Studio Two control room, 10.00am–1.00pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Mike Stone. I’ll Follow the Sun opened the three-hour session that swept up the remaining stereo mixes for the LP — eight songs in one sitting, a month before release.¹
• 4 December 1964 (Fri) — LP release — Beatles for Sale, Parlophone PMC 1240 (mono) and PCS 3062 (stereo). Seven weeks from first take to record shop, with two mixing sessions and no overdub date in between — and a song that had waited the better part of a decade to be recorded at all reached the public forty-seven days after it was finally taped.¹

Studio Notes

• The percussion is a problem being solved on the spot — the leg-slapping is usually told as a charming detail, but the account of the session makes it a fix. The kit was tried first and rejected as “too aggressive” for a song this quiet; the alternative arrived only after “a good deal of discussion”, and it was Paul’s suggestion. What survives on the record is the third thing anyone thought of.³
• A microphone between the knees, and EQ used the other way round — Norman Smith placed the mic between Ringo’s knees, then boosted equalisation in the control room to “add some extra depth to the sound”. That is worth pausing on, because the instinct with a hand or a slap is to reach for the top end and get the crack. Here the engineer went the opposite way: a slap on a trouser leg has plenty of transient and almost no body, and the body is what had to be manufactured for it to sit under an acoustic guitar rather than on top of it.³
• The track sheet says “drums”, and the eyewitness says there were none — the surviving 1964 tape documentation assigns Track 1 to “Acoustic Guitar and Drums”, while the second engineer’s account of the session has the kit abandoned before the master was cut. Both readings are given here rather than resolved: a track sheet records what a tape operator wrote in the box, often in the shorthand of the arrangement as first planned, and “Drums” is the obvious label for whatever the drummer contributed to that track. The two are reconcilable, but nothing in either source says so outright.^2,3
• This is one of the documented track sheets, which is rarer than it sounds — most 1964 tape layouts have to be reconstructed by applying the known four-track convention to the stereo mixes. I’ll Follow the Sun is among the handful drawn from surviving track sheets, so its allocation — acoustic guitar and drums, electric guitar, vocals, guitar solo — is evidence rather than inference. Where a page on this site gives a layout, the difference between those two situations is worth knowing.²
• A whole track for eight bars of guitar — Track 4 carries nothing but the solo. On a four-track tape that is an expensive decision, and it is the mechanical reason the arrangement could change at take 8: the solo did not have to share space with a vocal or be bounced in over something else, so replacing the acoustic break was a matter of recording onto an empty track rather than re-cutting the song.^1,2
• The outboard was wired to the tape, not to the song — “Each of the four Main Fader channels on the REDD.51 desk had an item of outboard gear inserted into it: Main Faders I and II always had RS124 Altec compressors inserted; III and IV always used… Fairchild 660 limiters (after early 1964). This patching arrangement was directly tied to the four-track tape layout.” Read onto this song, the acoustic guitar, the leg percussion and the electric guitar went down through Altec compression, and the vocals and the solo through Fairchild limiting. The solo is being limited like a voice, because of where it happened to sit on the tape.²
• Nothing was committed wet — from the start of 1964 Norman Smith had “finally stopped printing the chamber to tape during recording”; echo went on at the time of mixing instead. For a recording this bare it matters more than usual: the intimacy is a property of the mix decisions taken on 21 October and 4 November, not something baked into the performance, and the mono and stereo could in principle have been given quite different amounts of room.²
• The desk could not pan, so the stereo is blocks — the REDD.51 had no panning controls, which is why 1964 stereo places tracks rather than positions them. With acoustic guitar and percussion sharing Track 1 and the electric guitar alone on Track 2, the stereo puts the song’s entire rhythmic foundation on one side and the electric guitar on the other, vocals centred. The layout convention behind this was established and, by 1964, “strictly adhered to”.²
• The mono was mixed in Room 65 — not a studio control room. Room 65 appears in the mixing calendar of this period as a working mix room, and the first mono of this song was made there rather than in Studio Two. The stereo two weeks later went back to the Studio Two control room, on the REDD.51 desk the recording had been made on.^1,2
• One mono remix, and that was that — several Beatles for Sale tracks were mixed for mono, found wanting and remixed weeks later. This one was not. The 21 October mono stood, which is a quiet vote of confidence in a recording made at the end of a nine-hour Sunday.¹
• A deliberate change of air on the album — the second engineer’s reaction was that it “couldn’t have provided a greater contrast to” everything else recorded that day, and the day in question was the album’s rock-and-roll marathon. The song that had been pushed back for years because it was too soft for the group’s live image ends up on the record precisely as relief from that image.^1,3
• What the song does not have — no drum kit on the master, no overdub session after the recording date, no re-make, no double-tracked lead vocal, and no echo printed to tape. At 1:48 it is also among the shortest things on the album. The production decisions here are almost all subtractions, which is unusual for a period in which the four-track was mostly being used to add.^1,3

Releases

Two mixes exist, and every release carries one of them.

• 1964 UK LP mono — Beatles for Sale (4 December 1964, Parlophone PMC 1240) — the mono pulls the whole arrangement into one point, which suits a song this sparse: the leg-slap percussion sits directly under the acoustic guitar instead of beside it, and the two voices read as one blended line.
• 1964 UK LP stereo — Beatles for Sale (4 December 1964, Parlophone PCS 3062) — the 1964 block split, and on this song it is unusually exposing: acoustic guitar and percussion together on one side, the electric guitar and its solo answering from the other, vocals centred, and nothing anywhere in between (see Studio Notes).
• 1964 US LP — Beatles ’65 (Capitol T-2228 mono / ST-2228 stereo) — the American home for the track. The mixes are the UK mono and stereo; the Capitol mastering is what differs.
• 1965 UK EP — Beatles for Sale (No 2) (first issued 4 June 1965, Parlophone GEP 8938, mono) — the same mono master, and this song opens side A ahead of Baby’s in Black, with Words of Love and I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party on side B. Four tracks from one album, and the quietest of them leads.
• 1987 CD — Beatles for Sale (EMI CDP 7 46438 2) — the first digital issue, carrying the mono. For twenty-odd years the CD version of this song was the centred mix.
• 2009 CD — Beatles for Sale, stereo remaster (Apple 82414 2) — the stereo, remastered. The placement is untouched, but the noise floor drops and the leg-slap becomes properly audible as a struck sound rather than a vague pulse — on a quiet track this is the remaster that changes the most.
• 2009 mono companion — the mono remaster programme of the same year returns the 1964 mono to digital alongside the stereo. No catalogue number is given here for this song’s appearance in that programme, as none was confirmed.

Sources

1. Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 12, 50–53.
2. Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums (Houston: Curvebender Publishing, 2006), 379–81, 383–84.
3. Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 260.