And Your Bird Can Sing

The song carries the motifs of social commentary, self reflection and sound. It uses irony (mock-congratulatory cataloguing of the addressee's boasts), as it does in 'Act Naturally', ten months earlier. One for the word-counters, "possessions" turns up in no other Beatles lyric.

In E major at roughly 123 BPM, 'And Your Bird Can Sing' is a rock and jangle pop song, with Motown and Indian music influences (Toby Litt has called it a drone quality with raga phrasing in the twin-lead riff). There is a defining riff, Harmonised lead-guitar hook drives the song. Then, the record has a capo partway up the neck (2nd fret on the 26 April 1966 remake, D shapes sounding in E). The harmony takes in an augmented chord, which fourteen Beatles songs use, and Lennon reached for it more than the others, on nine of them.

Cut at EMI Studio 2 with the band remaking the song a few days after an initial attempt. McCartney and Harrison overdubbed the harmonised twin-lead guitar parts together. The Epiphone Casino ES-230TD on the track is McCartney and Harrison's twin-lead tone. The kit in the room included the Ludwig Super Classic, Starr's own kit since 1964. The band reached for ADT (double tracked vocal) and close mic'ing on this one, the latter first heard 3 years earlier, on 'I Saw Her Standing There'. Two songs came off that day's tapes, the 109th and 110th of the career.

Lennon wrote the song and sang it himself, and there is a role swap on it, McCartney on electric guitar. It has nobody but the four of them playing or singing, true of nine of the nineteen songs they cut in 1966. McCartney is credited with an upper harmony of the twin-lead riff.

Like most of the catalogue it was an album track, out on August 5, 1966 with Revolver. America got it seven weeks earlier, on Yesterday and Today, put out by Capitol. This song was the 11th of the 16 records the Beatles released in that year, and the 113th counting from the start.