What do the lyrics to ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ really mean?
At the height of the psychedelic movement, songs didn’t really have to mean anything anymore. For every great rock band with something to say about society or the fellowship of humanity, there were just as many people writing songs about absolute nonsense. While these songs have their place and have probably inspired half of Noel Gallagher’s songbook, Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ is far more intricate than most people think.
Coming out amidst the ‘Summer of Love’, the Procol Harum classic is among the most celebrated songs of the time. Despite sounding like the musical equivalent of rock being dipped in a potent stream of acid, what did Keith Reid actually mean to tell the audience with his song about the colours of his dreams?
Because outside of the regular meter of the lyrics, the words don’t seem to make that much sense from one line to the next, including one-off lines about eyes being opened and closed at the same time. If you’re in tune with what the band are actually about, these kinds of disassociated images make all the sense in the world.
When writing the initial song, Reid wasn’t looking to write any kind of linear narrative. Much in the vein of contemporary songs like The Beatles’ ‘I Am The Walrus’, many of the lyrics were meant to be nothing more than emotive nonsense, as if trying to describe feelings that most can’t put into words. While no one will claim to be a scholar when reciting lyrics like this, the song is practically the sounds of the ‘Summer of Love’ and those feelings that come with living in tune with the cosmos, more often than not brought on by LSD.
Even if the song doesn’t work as a logical statement, it still reads like poetry, creating the kind of surrealist art piece perfect for the ‘Summer of Love’. As we take a deep dive into the song, though, there might be little pieces to embrace amidst the nonsense.
Who first wrote ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’?
When working on the first pieces of Procol Harum’s discography, Keith Reid stumbled upon the lyrics after hearing bits and pieces of Gary Brooker playing keyboards. When starting to play the beginnings of Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’, Brooker’s fumbling of the sheet music became one of the happiest accidents in rock history, causing him to veer into different directions before stumbling upon the iconic organ part.
With the swinging sixties officially underway, Reid made lyrics that read like a tone poem, saying that his intention was to “conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story”. While the yearning in Brooker’s voice does sound like a sad lover parting ways with his old flame, you have to remember the year in which it was released.
When was ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’?
Coming out in May of 1967, Reid had made the kind of song that fit in perfectly with the oncoming ‘Flower Power’ generation. Putting one surreal image after the next, Reid said that he wanted to make something that would stir something in the listener, explaining, “I wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images, I was trying to be evocative. I suppose it seems like a decadent scene I’m describing. But I was too young to have experienced any decadence, then. I might have been smoking when I conceived it”.
Chemically impaired or not, the song is the ultimate example of putting different disassociated pieces together to make a feeling rather than a traditional statement. Instead of going on one linear storyline throughout the entire song, the lyrics are practically incoherent on purpose, as if these strange images will somehow describe love, happiness, and melancholy all in one go. The 1960s may have seen many artists start taking leaps of faith whenever they got behind the microphone, but ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ is the perfect example of a song that’s designed not to make sense. Whether or not every word bleeds into each other, the point is that the vibe behind the lyrics is just right.
