10 Mind-Blowing Secrets Hidden In Famous Songs
1. The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Forever
If you haven’t heard the conspiracy theory that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike, please, for the love of god, take a weekend, tie on a safety line, and plunge headfirst into one of the deepest and most bizarre Youtube rabbit holes you are ever likely to encounter.
The abridged version is that the bassist had an argument with the other three Beatles during a recording session one stormy night and drove off angrily, crashing his car and decapitating himself shortly after. To prevent mass hysteria, or simply to ensure that they were able to keep up the charade for commercial reasons, the winner of a Paul McCartney lookalike competition, called either William Campbell or Billy Shears - depending on which school of thought you buy into - was drafted in and taught how to mimic the now-deceased McCartney to a tee.
Obviously, this is almost certainly false, but the Fab Four, being the mischief makers that they were, picked up on the rumours and decided to propagate them through their own work. Album covers contained hidden clues, inexplicable photographs of the supposed doppelgänger emerged, and perhaps most significantly of all, they started dropping massive hints into their songs.
On Glass Onion, for instance, John Lennon reveals that the Beatle in the walrus costume was in fact Paul - the walrus being a symbol of death in Nordic mythology. Similarly, on I’m So Tired, a back-masked message seemingly hears John say “Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him”.
Perhaps most famous of all, however, is the throwaway comment made by Lennon during the muddled, experimental outro of Strawberry Fields Forever. He always claimed to have innocently said “cranberry sauce”, but listen after listen, time after time, it’s hard to shift the feeling that he could easily be saying “I buried Paul”. Chances are, it’s nothing more than an elaborate hoax, but you’ve really got to admire the dedication to the bit.