9 Popular Songs With Disturbing Implications You Never Noticed

3. "Norwegian Wood" Is About Vengeful Arson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY5i4-rWh44

Recorded for the band's album Rubber Soul, "Norwegian Wood" has received something of a resurgence in popularity thanks to the phenonmenal success of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's novel of the same name. Though the song appears to be detailing a brief, romantic encounter between a man and a woman...

I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me She showed me her room, isn't it good, Norwegian wood?

...It's actually about a scorned man who burns his lover's house to the ground. After being laughed at and made to sleep in the bath:

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath

The singer later wakes up to discover the woman has abandoned him:

And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown So I lit a fire, isn't it good, Norwegian wood?

At the time of writing, Norwegian wood was a fake material used to fashion extremely cheap furniture. Not only that, but the wood burns extremely quickly, meaning the woman's house would have gone up in flames in mere seconds. As McCartney himself said:

"So she makes him sleep in the bath and then finally in the last verse I had this idea to set the Norwegian wood on fire as revenge, so we did it very tongue in cheek. She led him on, then said, 'You'd better sleep in the bath'. In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it meant I burned the f*cking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental."