‘I’m Looking Through You’: The Beatles song riddled with recording errors
It wasn’t rocket science when it came to recording The Beatles. During the first half of their career, producer George Martin and engineer Norman Smith had a foolproof plan of attack: set up the mics, hit the record button, and let the band unleash their magic. Before The Beatles became enamoured with the possibilities of the recording studio, it wasn’t uncommon for multiple songs or even entire albums to be recorded in a single day.
The most famous example is, of course, the one-day extravaganza that made Please, Please Me a classic tale of rock and roll efficiency. But as late as 1965’s Rubber Soul, The Beatles were working as quickly as humanly possible. For that album in particular, the band were faced with a Christmas deadline. Although their approach to songwriting had rapidly evolved by that point, the necessities of the contracts had not evolved with them.
Recorded in just one month and released only a few weeks after completion, Rubber Soul is a titanic record that shows off the leaps that the group had made in just a few short years. But just below the surface, the album is littered with minor slip-ups, recording errors, faulty notes, and more. It’s almost impossible to catch these mess-ups the first hundred times that you listen to the record. However, with more than five decades of close listening and enhanced technology, Rubber Soul has a few songs that aren’t quite as perfect as they sound.
The most egregious is probably ‘I’m Looking Through You’, Paul McCartney’s ode to his deteriorating relationship with actress Jane Asher. At different points, it’s audible to hear out-of-tune guitars, clicks, pops, feedback, and even some dropped instruments that are left in the song’s final mix. Minor mistakes like these weren’t uncommon in the band’s music, especially given the rate at which they were expected to crank out material. But ‘I’m Looking Through You’ might be the most painfully obvious.
Within the first 20 seconds, it’s possible to hear one of the band’s acoustic guitars’ feedback. Along with most of the errors in the final mix, Martin did his best to gloss over or hide the mistakes. But thanks to fan sites like ‘What Goes On: The Beatles Anomalies List’, dedicated listeners have become pretty good at pointing out the flubs that appear.
Around the one-minute mark, the overdubbed handclaps get out of time and briefly drop out altogether. At the 1:18 mark, a high-pitched squeal of feedback comes through the mix loud and clear. Soon after, a tambourine makes its only appearance during the song’s verse. It comes in on the beat, but its absence from any other verse could mean that Ringo Starr possibly dropped the tambourine during the recording.
Throughout the track, George Harrison plays guitar lines that barely stay in tune. Around the 1:50 mark, his guitar gets badly out of tune, and it’s possible to hear him wrangle with the instrument to try and get it back in pitch. Just a few seconds later, Starr misses the snare drum and sporadically hits it in different places. As the song fades, Harrison once again wrestles with the guitar to keep it in tune, causing a fast fade as soon as he abandons the central chorus riff.
‘I’m Looking Through You’ was among the last songs recorded for Rubber Soul. Along with the rest of the album’s tracks, it saw most of its overdubs get recorded on November 11th, the final day of recording. It’s possible that ‘I’m Looking Through You’ caught The Beatles at their most harried and exhausted, trying desperately to finish Rubber Soul before their mandatory deadline. Martin mixed the album in one day, and the results leave ‘I’m Looking Through You’ as one of the messiest songs ever released by the band.
See if you can hear all the mistakes on ‘I’m Looking Through You’ down below.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.