The most magical two seconds in pop music

It’s amazing to think that we can pinpoint the most magical two seconds in pop music, which occur exactly one minute into ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ by The Beatles, as Take 7 melts into Take 26. Listening casually, all you’ll hear at this point is the song ‘kicking in’ – the gentle, dreamy introduction giving way to the heavier, more orchestrated, more percussive body of the song. Listen to it a lot, over and over, on headphones, and you might notice something else. Although the song doesn’t change key or tempo, it does change. Lennon’s voice becomes thicker and more woozy; the instrumentation shifts; and the mood, for want of a better word, completely alters. It’s the aural equivalent of a dolly zoom shot in cinema, where the camera moves in one direction on tracks (dolly) while the lens zooms in the other, keeping the subject the same size while the world around them distorts. In the case of ‘Strawberry Fields’ the word ‘magical’ doesn’t seem like an exaggeration. Here’s how…