{"id":51,"date":"2024-11-26T16:29:27","date_gmt":"2024-11-26T16:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/?p=51"},"modified":"2025-07-14T12:18:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T12:18:39","slug":"201-its-all-too-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/201-its-all-too-much\/","title":{"rendered":"201: It’s All Too Much"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I think I misjudged this one when putting the ranking together. Listening to it again, it has a lot going for it: it’s sonically inventive with a strong distorted lead guitar sound which is more prominent than in other Beatles tracks and a driving, pounding rhythm section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musically, it sounds a bit like Harrison’s answer to Tomorrow Never Knows or Strawberry Fields. Before I look at the Beatles Bible and Wikipedia, I am thinking it was recorded around the time of the Sgt Pepper sessions or just afterward, and maybe initially rejected as an album track\u2026 We’ll see\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s certainly one of the songs I am least familiar with, I may have only listened three or four times before today.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"BeatlesThe Beatles Bible<\/span><\/div>

Written while under the influence of LSD, \u2018It\u2019s All Too Much\u2019 was the second song by George Harrison to feature on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack.<\/p>\"YellowContinue reading on Beatles Bible \u2192<\/a><\/div><\/div>

\"Wikipedia\"Wikipedia<\/span><\/div>
"It's All Too Much" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 album Yellow Submarine. Written by George Harrison in 1967, it conveys the ideological themes of that year's Summer of Love. The Beatles recorded the track in May 1967…<\/div>Continue reading on Wikipedia \u2192<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

Ah yes – written under the influence of LSD and describing insights gained through that and confirmed in meditation.
I was right that it was recorded just after completion of Sgt Peppers. George Harrison was quite keen on the spiritual aspect of psychedelia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had begun studying Indian culture at this time and eventually embraced meditation and became a devotee of the Hare Krishna tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Religious_views_of_the_Beatles<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time he had an irreverent character and felt uncomfortable with anything too pompous, pretentious or earnest. Later, for example, he would fund the production of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a movie devoted to the mining the humour out of hypocrisy of organized religion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s perhaps easier to tread the tricky line between irreverence and reverence with Eastern religious traditions which can often have a light-hearted element, rather than with the Catholicism Harrison was brought up with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any event it’s quite characteristic that he includes lines like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“All the world\u2019s a birthday cake,
So take a piece but not too much”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Show me that I\u2019m everywhere, and get me home for tea”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Overall It’s All Too Much is an interesting and inventive song that probably should have been ranked higher!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think I misjudged this one when putting the ranking together. Listening to it again, it has a lot going for it: it’s sonically inventive with a strong distorted lead guitar sound which is more prominent than in other Beatles tracks and a driving, pounding rhythm section. Musically, it sounds a bit like Harrison’s answer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11,18],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-song-a-day","tag-harrison","tag-yellow-submarine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions\/95"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}