5 Things to Know About "Tomorrow Never Knows"

The opening line is “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.” It is the first lyric of the final track on The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver.

John Lennon wrote the song after reading The Psychedelic Experience, a take on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The lyrics are directly inspired by that text.

The recording is famously experimental. It uses tape loops, reversed guitars, a hypnotic drum pattern from Ringo Starr, and Lennon’s voice processed through a spinning Leslie speaker cabinet.

It is one of the first pop songs to use sampling. The seagull-like sound is actually a sped-up recording of Paul McCartney laughing.

The song works best on headphones. The layered effects and spatial sound design hold up remarkably well.