Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" is the name of a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney for their band, the Beatles. The song was eventually included on their Rubber Soul album. It was one of the first Western pop songs with an Indian musical instrument — John Lennon's guitar is accompanied by George Harrison on the sitar. The song is a lilting acoustic ballad featuring Lennon's lead vocal and signature Beatle harmonies on the middle eight section.

The song's lyrics are interpretable in several different manners — one of the more obvious interpretations (backed by McCartney as the intended meaning) ends with the singer burning down his girl's house. Another controversial interpretation has the "Norwegian wood" of the song interpreted as marijuana, a reference not out of the realm of possibility, considering that the Beatles had been smoking marijuana and cannabis during the production of Rubber Soul.

Inspiration from infidelity

The song was apparently inspired by Lennon's extra-marital flings. Ironically, he wrote it while he was on a holiday with his wife, Cynthia in the Alps. They were joined by the Beatles' producer, George Martin, and his wife. Martin was inspired by a slapstick performance of Lennon's to perform a stunt of his own, and as he sailed into the room: "There was a huge noise like a twig breaking and I collapsed in agony on the floor. They all said, 'Very good. Very good, now do it again.' And I said, 'You fools! I've broken my fookin' foot,' and they didn't believe me. But, of course, I had. 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'."

Lennon said of the song: "I was trying to write about an affair, so it was very gobbledegooky. I was trying to write about an affair without letting my wife know I was having one. I was sort of writing from my experiences... girl's flats, things like that." He also said: "'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 on, 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." Lennon's friend, Pete Shotton, speculated that the woman in question was a journalist of their acquaintance, although it is equally likely that the woman was one of the numerous groupies or fans constantly following the Beatles.

McCartney was apparently the inspiration for the singer's revenge on his partner in the end of the song. As he explained: "Peter Asher [brother of McCartney's then-girlfriend, Jane Asher] had just done his room out in wood, and a lot of people were decorating their places in wood. Norwegian wood. It was pine, really, just cheap pine. But it's not as good a title, is it, 'Cheap Pine'? It was a little parody, really, on those kind of girls who, when you'd get back to their flat, there would be a lot of Norwegian wood. It was completely imaginary from my point of view, but not from John's. It was based on an affair he had. She made him sleep in the bath and then, finally, in the last verse, I had this idea to set the Norwegian wood on fire as a revenge. She led him on and said, 'You'd better sleep in the bath.' And in our world, that meant the guy having some sort of revenge, so it meant burning the place down..."

Lennon acknowledged being strongly influenced by Bob Dylan during this time period, as evidenced by songs such as "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" and "I'm A Loser", and the rather opaque lyrics of the song reflected this. Dylan may have felt he was being mocked and responded to the song with a similar tune, "4th Time Around", which has a similar melody and a similar subject and is sometimes considered a parody of "Norwegian Wood".

It was Harrison, who would later be strongly influenced by transcendental meditation and eventually become a life-long Hindu, who decided on using a sitar when the Beatles recorded the song on October 12 and 21 1965. As he recounted later: "We were waiting to shoot the restaurant scene [in Help! the movie]... where the guy gets thrown in the soup and there were a few Indian musicians playing in the background. I remember picking up the sitar and trying to hold it and thinking, 'This is a funny sound.' It was an incidental thing, but somewhere down the line I began to hear Ravi Shankar's name. The third time I heard it, I thought, 'This is an odd coincidence.' So I went and bought a Ravi record; put it on and it hit a certain spot in me that I can't explain, but it seemed very familiar to me. It just called on me... I bought a cheap sitar from a shop called India Craft in London. I hadn't really figured out what to do with it. But when we were working on 'Norwegian Wood' it just needed something. It was quite spontaneous... I just picked it up and found the notes and just played it. We miked it up and put it on and it just seemed to hit the spot."

Lyrics

The lyrics of the song sketch an encounter between the singer and an unnamed girl (or "bird" in British slang); as the pair drink wine and talk into the night the singer rebuffs the girl's romantic advances, eventually leaving to "sleep in the bath". The following morning, the singer finds himself alone.

The exact meaning of the title "Norwegian Wood" remains a mystery. The name of the song is mentioned in the first verse ("She showed me her room / Isn't it good? / Norwegian wood?") and again in its last line ("So, I lit a fire / Isn't it good? / Norwegian wood?"). Some say that "Norwegian Wood" may be a pun with a nickname of a strong variety of marijuana. Others claim the final line of the song implies that the singer burned the home of the girl (the apparent official version, according to McCartney) using the furniture as fuel, or burned the girl's furniture in the fireplace. As mentioned earlier, pine, or wood from Norway, was in great demand at the time of writing, and it is probable McCartney and Lennon were influenced by the trend.

"Norwegian Wood" was just one of several songs on Rubber Soul in which the singer faces an antagonistic relationship with a woman. In direct contrast to earlier Beatles songs such as "She Loves You" and "I Want To Hold Your Hand", the songs on Rubber Soul were considerably more negative in their outlook towards romantic relationships. The girl in "You Won't See Me" is described as immature and obstinately refusing to listen to the singer. In "I'm Looking Through You", the girl "did not treat" the singer right. "Girl" depicts someone who "puts you down when friends are there", and "Run For Your Life" features a vague death threat.

As the second song on the Rubber Soul album (following the more conventional "I've Just Seen a Face" on the US release or "Drive My Car" on the UK version), the exotic instrumentation and oblique lyric represented one of the first indications to fans of the expanding musical vocabulary and experimental approach that the group was rapidly adopting. A sample from the song is available.

References

• In 1987, popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami published a novel

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