The correct date
In My Life was recorded in 1965, not 1967. The basic track was made on 18 October 1965 during the sessions for Rubber Soul, the album released in Britain in December of that year. The piano solo that makes the recording distinctive was added a few days later. Anyone looking for a 1967 recording of the song will not find one; the interest of the recording for a history of 1967 lies in how it showed what the studio could do.
The meaning of the lyric and the dispute over who wrote the tune are covered in a separate piece. This one is about the sound.
The session
Rubber Soul was made in a tight schedule in October and November 1965, with the group needing to finish the album in time for the Christmas market. The session on 18 October established the song’s core: voices, guitars, bass and drums. Harrison’s opening guitar figure and the general character of the arrangement were fixed at this stage.
There was a gap in the song, an instrumental passage that still needed something. This left room for George Martin, their producer, to suggest a different texture.
The piano solo
Martin, who had trained as a musician in a classical tradition, wrote a short solo in a style that recalls the keyboard music of the 18th century. The reported difficulty was that the passage was too fast for him to play comfortably at the intended speed.
His solution was a studio method. The track was slowed so that he could record the part at half speed, an octave lower, and when the tape was played back at normal speed the solo sounded twice as fast and an octave higher. The result is a bright, slightly metallic sound, closer to a harpsichord than to a regular piano, and with a precision that would have been hard to achieve by playing at full speed.
This is the baroque piano solo that listeners notice. It sits before the final verse and lasts only a few bars. It is brief, but it is one of the best-known moments on the record.
How it worked technically
The technique relies on a basic property of tape. If a recording is made at a slow speed and played back at normal speed, the pitch rises and the notes come faster. It is the same principle as speeding up a record. Studios of the time had machines with adjustable speed, so the method was available, though not often used for such a musical purpose in popular music at that date.
There is also an effect on tone. Playing a piano part at half speed and then speeding it up shortens the natural decay of each note, producing a thinner and more percussive sound. That is part of why the passage sounds like a harpsichord.
It is worth being careful about details. Accounts agree on the general method, but small details, such as the exact tape arrangement, are described somewhat differently in different sources.
A piece of problem-solving
The solo shows a habit that became typical of the group’s work with Martin: when something could not be done in the obvious way, the answer was to change the equipment or the process. The same attitude produced the tape loops of Revolver in 1966 and the orchestral overdubs of 1967.
It also shows the benefit of a producer with a classical background. Martin could write in a period style, and he understood how a technical alteration could change the sound. That blend of musical knowledge and studio technique was part of what let the group extend their records beyond standard guitar-bass-drums arrangements.
Looking ahead to 1967
The instrumental colour of In My Life is modest compared with what followed, but it points forward. In February 1967, the single Penny Lane used a high piccolo trumpet part in a style also associated with baroque music, and Strawberry Fields Forever used a Mellotron, a keyboard that plays recorded tape sounds. Each of these songs relied on the idea that an unusual instrument or studio effect could give a pop record a new character.
By the time of the Sgt. Pepper album, such choices were part of the group’s identity. The 1965 piano solo is therefore a small early example of the studio innovation that critics later associated with the year 1967. It would be an overstatement to say that it caused those later developments, but it is a clear step in the same direction.
Why the date matters
The title’s reference to 1967 is understandable. The group’s name is so closely tied to that year that songs from other years are often misplaced in memory. Putting In My Life back in 1965 is more than a correction of detail. It shows that the experimental ideas of 1967 were built up over a period of several records, with Rubber Soul and Revolver as steps along the way, and that the studio work usually credited to 1967 had roots two years earlier.