John Lennon says one instrument made all the difference for Abbey Road song I Want You (She’s So Heavy)

An instrumental addition made all the difference to Abbey Road track I Want You (She’s So Heavy) according to John Lennon.

The Beatles‘ Abbey Road album was given the track-by-track treatment by Lennon over a series of interviews. When speaking on I Want You (She’s So Heavy), Lennon suggested it was a Moog synthesiser that made all the difference. Lennon would single out his own works as some of the best on the album, and rightly so. But he would also praise Ringo Starr and George Harrison‘s contributions to the album. Paul McCartney didn’t get off as nicely, with Lennon suggesting the Wings frontman’s voice would ruin one of the more interersting pieces of work. While he would call Maxwell’s Silver Hammer a “typical” song by McCartney, Lennon reserved his harshest words for Oh! Darling.

Speaking of the song in an interview given in 1980, Lennon would suggest the problem with Oh! Darling is not the instrumental work, but McCartney’s voice. He said: “Oh! Darling’ was a great one of Paul’s that he didn’t sing too well. I always thought I could have done it better – it was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he’s going to sing it.”

Whether Lennon felt McCartney should have given him the song to sing is unclear, but it seems the Imagine hitmaker feels he would have been a better vocal fit for the track. The boo-wop adaptation left Harrison feeling a little cold too, with the songwriter sharing he was no fan of the song.

The so-called quiet one of The Beatles would dismiss Oh! Darling as nothing more than “Paul shouting” in a track-by-track analysis of Abbey Road for Rolling Stone Magazine. He writes of the song: “Oh! Darling is another of Paul’s songs, which is a typical 1950-1960 sort of period in its chord structure.

But when it came to I Want You (She’s So Heavy), which closed out the Abbey Road A-side, he says the “pretty heavy” feeling is thanks to the Moog synthesiser.

He said: “It’s pretty heavy, y’know, the ending, because we used the Moog synthesiser on it. The range from the sound is, y’know, from minus whatever to way over, well, you know you can’t hear it. That machine, the Moog synthesiser, can do all sound, all ranges of sound, so we did that on the end and if you’re a dog you’ll hear a lot more.”

Come Together was also singled out by Lennon, while Something was noted as “the best track on the album”. He said: “I think it’s [Come Together] pretty funky, y’know I’m biased because it’s my song, but I dig it. It just happened and there’s a nice funky sound on it.”