Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

(Lennon/McCartney)

Quick Facts

Composer	John & Paul
Lead Vocal	John
Recorded	Oct 1965
Length	2:05
Key	E
Noted Takes	4
Producer	George Martin
Engineer	Norman Smith

Originally released on

Rubber Soul

Parlophone — PMC 1267

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"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", otherwise known as simply "Norwegian Wood", is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1965 album Rubber Soul. It was written mainly by John, with lyrical contributions from Paul, and credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. Influenced by the introspective lyrics of Bob Dylan, the song is considered a milestone in the Beatles' development as songwriters.

Lennon wrote it as a coded confession to Cynthia about an extramarital affair (most likely with a journalist; Lennon was deliberately cryptic). The 'Norwegian wood' of the title was, McCartney later explained, the cheap pine cladding then fashionable in London flats — 'we were trying to get away from the saying it straight.' George's sitar debut on 'Norwegian Wood' marks a watershed moment in Western popular music's adoption of Indian classical instruments. Recorded during September-October 1965, the cryptic lyrical narrative—suggesting a cancelled romantic encounter and possible arson—embodied the album's marijuana-influenced introspection. The song's harmonic sophistication reflected Lennon's deepening engagement with folk-rock arrangements and non-Western musical traditions. Lennon's cryptic narrative describes a one-night stand through ambiguous furnishings. George's beginner-level sitar playing doubles the melody line without elaborate embellishment, framing the song's Dylanesque melancholy.

Cut in October 1965 with George playing the first sitar to appear on a Western pop record. Harrison had recently bought the instrument during the Help! film shoot and was learning it (his lessons with Ravi Shankar would not begin in earnest until the following year). The take was recorded twice; the second version is the one released. The sitar was overdubbedafter initial guitar-and-vocal tracking, capturing Harrison's carefully learned technique under studio guidance. The song demonstrates Rubber Soul's technical precision: layered acoustic guitars, double-tracked vocals, and capo positioning selected to achieve desired modal tonality. The production required careful microphone placement and mixing under George Martin's direction to balance sitar prominence against vocal clarity (Lewisohn 1988, p. 63-66).

The sitar introduction and raga-influenced modal structure represented a significant breakthrough for the Beatles' sonic palette. Lennon's sitar part, sensed by acid experimentation and influenced by Crosby's raga exposure, employs an E-major drone characteristic of Indian classical music.

What's distinctive

At 2:05 it's bottom fifth by length. One of 101 songs led primarily by John. Recorded approximately 8 of 16 into the Rubber Soul Era (late 1965) sessions. Carries the unique tag 'sitar-debut' — no other song shares it. Take count: 5 (highest take number documented in Lewisohn).¹

Recording

Recorded twice, nine days apart — the song went onto tape complete on 12 October 1965, in Studio Two between 7.00 and 11.30pm, under the working title “This Bird Has Flown”. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ken Scott and Phil McDonald. That version reached take 1 and stopped there, and it is a finished record in its own right — John’s vocal double-tracked in places, George’s sitar, Paul’s harmony, and a percussion bed of finger cymbals, tambourine and maraca in place of a drum kit. It was then set aside, and on 21 October the group started again from nothing.¹
The re-make is a rethink, not a retake — the three takes cut on 21 October were numbered two to four, take 4 being marked best, and each one was different to the one before it. Take 2 opened with a heavy sitar introduction. Take 3 dropped the sitar altogether in favour of two acoustic guitars and Paul’s bass and nothing else, which is where the acoustic opening on the finished record comes from. Take 4 put the sitar back over that acoustic frame. Nine days had not been spent polishing a performance; they had been spent deciding what the arrangement was.¹
Four tracks, and where everything sits on them — Paul’s bass and George’s twelve-string acoustic share track 1; John’s acoustic guitar and vocal, backed by Paul, occupy track 3; George’s sitar was overdubbed onto track 2; and bass drum and tambourine went onto track 4. Bass sharing a track with a guitar is the tell of the period — a bass guitar would not get a tape track to itself on this album until “Michelle” — and it is why the low end and the twelve-string cannot be separated from one another in any mix of this song.²
The sitar overdub, and what it cost the control room — the instrument went on after the basic performance rather than with it, which was the only practical way to handle a source the desk could not read. A sitar produces sharp transients over a dense harmonic spectrum, so the meter swings hard while the perceived loudness stays low; the engineer’s options were to let it distort or to flatten it with a limiter and lose the resonance that is the entire point of the instrument. Neither is a good option, and the record takes the first one.^1,2
Two accounts of the vocal, and they are not describing the same tape — the 12 October attempt carried a vocal “double-tracked in places”; the released version is described as one of two “single-tracked highlights of Rubber Soul”, the other being “Michelle”. Read together the two statements are not a contradiction but a measurement of how far the re-make travelled: the discarded version leaned on doubling for weight, and the one that shipped does without it. Artificial double tracking did not exist yet in any case — it arrives in April 1966 — so any doubling here was sung twice by hand.^1,2
The crash cymbal that gets pulled down — a crash is audible faintly beneath the end of the song, and in the original 1965 mixes it is abruptly turned down as it decays rather than being allowed to ring out. It is the one unmistakable act of mixing on a record that otherwise just presents what four people played, and it is the sort of decision that only shows itself on a good pair of headphones in the last two seconds.²

Equipment

Studio	EMI Studios, Abbey Road — Studio Two (recording, 12 and 21 Oct 1965); Studio Two control room (mixing, 25 and 26 Oct 1965)¹
Tape machine	Studer J37 four-track²
Console	REDD.51²
Track 1	Paul’s bass and George’s twelve-string acoustic guitar²
Track 2	George’s sitar (overdub)²
Track 3	John’s acoustic guitar and lead vocal, backed by Paul²
Track 4	Bass drum and tambourine (overdub)²
Percussion (12 Oct version)	Finger cymbals, tambourine and maraca — no drum kit¹

Recording Timeline

12 October 1965 (Tue), 7.00–11.30pm — “This Bird Has Flown”, take 1, EMI Studio Two — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ken Scott and Phil McDonald. The evening booking followed an afternoon session, 2.30–7.00pm in the same room, that had produced “Run For Your Life” in five takes. One take was enough here: a complete recording with the vocal doubled in places, sitar, harmony vocals and a hand-percussion bed of finger cymbals, tambourine and maraca instead of drums. The verdict on it in the published log is that it was “still a brilliant recording, quite different but equally as dazzling as the version which ended up on the LP” — which is a striking thing to say about a take the group threw away.¹
21 October 1965 (Thu), 2.30–7.00pm — re-make, takes 2–4, EMI Studio Two — the afternoon produced three numbered takes and a false start, with take 4 marked best; the same day’s evening booking went to a re-make of “Nowhere Man”. The arrangement changed with every take rather than settling after the first, and one of the discarded attempts carries John’s spoken announcement stumbling over the title — “This Bird Has, er…er…Norwegian…” — which is a small reminder that the song had been called something else nine days earlier.¹
21 October 1965 (Thu) — the sitar goes back on, over an acoustic frame — the sequence within the afternoon is the interesting part. Take 2 led with the sitar; take 3 removed it and rebuilt the song on two acoustic guitars and bass alone; take 4 reinstated the sitar on top of what take 3 had established. The instrument is therefore not the foundation of the released record but a layer added back to a foundation that had been proved without it, which is why it reads as colour rather than as the arrangement’s spine.¹
25 October 1965 (Mon), 10.00am–1.00pm — mono remixing, Studio Two control room — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ken Scott. Mono remixes for the LP and single, done in a single three-hour sitting that also handled “Drive My Car”, “In My Life”, “If I Needed Someone” and “Nowhere Man”; this song was mixed from take 4. A whole album side’s worth of mono masters in a morning is the working tempo of late 1965, and it is the mix the group themselves attended.¹
26 October 1965 (Tue), 10.00am–12.30pm — stereo remixing, Studio Two control room — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ron Pender. The stereo pass came the next morning, again from take 4, and again as a batch. Four tape tracks going to two channels leaves almost nothing to decide except which tracks go which way: tracks 1 and 2 were panned hard left and tracks 3 and 4 hard right, so bass, twelve-string and sitar sit in one ear and voice, acoustic guitar and percussion in the other.^1,2

It is very hard to record because it has a lot of nasty peaks and a very complex wave form. My meter would be going right over into the red, into distortion, without us getting audible value for money. I could have used a limiter but that would have meant losing the sonorous quality.— Norman Smith, on recording the sitar¹

Studio Notes

The sitar arrives on a pop record — this is the instrument’s first appearance on a pop record, and the reason the song is a landmark in a way that has nothing to do with how well it was recorded. There is an earlier studio precedent, and it belongs to the same producer: George Martin had used a sitar and a tabla on a Peter Sellers session on 16 October 1959, six years before, on a recording almost nobody in the rock audience has heard. What changed in 1965 was not access to the instrument but the willingness to put one at the front of a hit single’s parent album.¹
Why the desk could not cope with it — the difficulty was measurement, not taste. “It is very hard to record because it has a lot of nasty peaks and a very complex wave form”, and the needle would swing into distortion without the sound getting any louder to the ear. A limiter would have held the peaks down and taken the resonance with them. The choice made on the night — ride it hot and accept the peaks — is audible: the sitar on this record has an edge that later, better-behaved Indian-instrument recordings on this catalogue do not.¹
A twelve-string sharing a track with a bass guitar — the four-track layout puts bass and twelve-string acoustic together on track 1, which is the single most consequential decision on the tape. Once two instruments are printed together their balance is fixed forever; no later mix can raise the bass without raising the twelve-string with it. It is worth knowing that a bass guitar would not get a track of its own on these sessions until “Michelle”, because it shows this was normal practice being followed rather than a compromise forced by a full tape.²
The overdubs are two, and they are both small — only the sitar and a bass drum and tambourine were added after the fact. Everything else — guitar, bass, voice, harmony — was played together into the room. A record with two overdubs is a record that was substantially finished before anyone reached for a second pass, and it explains the immediacy: what a listener hears is four people in a room plus a colour and a pulse, not an assembly.²
The doubled vocal that the re-make left behind — the discarded 12 October version had the lead vocal doubled in places; the released one is remembered as one of the album’s single-tracked performances. Doubling a vocal in 1965 meant singing it twice in unison and hoping the two passes lined up, because artificial double tracking did not exist until Ken Townsend built it in April 1966. Dropping the doubling on the re-make therefore removed real studio labour, and it left the voice exposed in a way the first attempt had avoided.^1,2
The end of the song is the one mixed moment — a crash cymbal sits faintly under the close, and the 1965 mixes pull it down sharply as it decays instead of letting it ring. On a record where the control room has almost nothing to do, one deliberate fade on one cymbal tail stands out; it is the only place on the master where a hand is visibly on a fader rather than simply setting a balance and leaving it.²
What separates the three circulating mixes — the tests are all in the vocal. The 1965 stereo and the 1987 stereo both put the lead voice far right, but in the 1965 mix it moves in the middle of the bridge, on “fussing and fighting”, and again at the bridge’s end, while the 1987 mix leaves it planted on the right throughout. The 1987 also carries heavy added reverb the 1965 mixes do not. A guitar plink in the decay at the very end sits on the left in the 1965 stereo. Any one of those three will tell a listener which mix is playing.³
Ken Scott’s last album at the desk’s right hand — the second engineer on both recording dates and on the mono remix session was Ken Scott, working under Norman Smith; the stereo pass the following morning was taken by Ron Pender. Rotating a second engineer between a mono session and its stereo counterpart was routine, and it is a reminder that the two 1965 mixes were not made by the same pair of hands on the same afternoon — a small part of why they differ in more than width.¹
A different sound, on purpose — the producer’s own recollection of this record is that it “used a different sound”, and that reaching for one was “typical of the Beatles”. That is worth setting against the technical picture, which is conservative throughout: four tracks, two overdubs, a live band, a routine batch mix. Nothing about the method is novel. The novelty is entirely in what was pointed at the microphone, which is a useful corrective to the idea that the group’s mid-sixties leap forward was a matter of equipment.²

Releases

Three mixes circulate — the 1965 mono, the 1965 stereo and the 1987 stereo remix — and a fourth, wholly separate recording of the song was released in 1996.

1965 UK mono LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PMC 1267, side A track 2) — Everything in one place, which suits a record built from a live performance: the sitar sits inside the band rather than beside it, and the twelve-string and bass read as a single low-mid weight. This is the mix the group were in the room for, and the one to start with.
1965 UK stereo LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PCS 3075, side A track 2) — A hard split down the middle: bass, twelve-string and sitar in the left ear, voice, acoustic guitar and percussion in the right. The lead vocal sits far right and shifts position mid-bridge, on “fussing and fighting”, and again at the end of the bridge. A guitar plink in the decay at the close is audible on the left.
1965 US LP — Rubber Soul (1965, Capitol T-2442 mono / ST-2442 stereo) — The American album drops four of the UK tracks and adds two, but this song survives the reshuffle with its mixes intact. Nothing is re-made for it, so a US pressing of this era offers the same two 1965 treatments in different company.
1987 CD — Rubber Soul (1987, EMI CDP 7 46440 2) — A remixed stereo, and the easiest of the three to identify: a great deal of reverb has been added to the lead vocal, and where the 1965 stereo moves the voice through the bridge, this one keeps it fixed to the right. It was the only version on compact disc for twenty-two years.
1996 outtake — Anthology 2 (1996, Apple CDP 8 34448 2) — Not another mix but another recording: the complete 12 October performance the group abandoned, with the vocal doubled and the percussion carried by finger cymbals, tambourine and maraca rather than a drum kit. The nearest thing the catalogue offers to hearing a familiar song’s discarded first draft in full.
2009 remasters — Rubber Soul (2009, Parlophone 99457 2) — The remaster programme reissued the album in stereo and in mono, returning the 1965 mono to general circulation for the first time since the LP era and making the three-way comparison practical for the first time on disc.

Sources

Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 63, 65–66, 69, 200.
Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums (Houston: Curvebender Publishing, 2006), 387, 397, 401, 407.
Joseph Brennan, Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations (rev. edn.), Norwegian Wood entry.

Frequently asked

Who wrote Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)?

It was written mainly by John, with a lyrical contribution from Paul, and is credited — as every song of theirs from this period is — to Lennon/McCartney.

Who sings lead on Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)?

The lead vocal is by John, with Paul backing him on the same tape track. The released performance is single-tracked.

When was Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) recorded?

Twice. A complete version was taped on 12 October 1965 at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, in Studio Two, under the working title “This Bird Has Flown”; it was set aside and the song was re-made from scratch on 21 October 1965.¹

How many takes did Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) require?

Four numbered takes across the two dates — take 1 on 12 October, then takes 2–4 on the 21st. Take 4 was marked best and every released mix descends from it.¹

Was the sitar on Norwegian Wood double-tracked?

Not on the released version. George overdubbed it onto a single tape track, and the reports of a doubled sitar describe the discarded 12 October recording rather than the record.²

Which mix of Norwegian Wood should I listen to?

The 1965 mono for the record as the group signed it off; the 1965 stereo to hear the hard left/right split and the vocal moving through the bridge. The 1987 CD stereo adds heavy reverb and keeps the voice fixed to the right.³

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What's distinctive

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

Studio Notes

Releases

Sources

Frequently asked