Raymond Schillinger of You Can’t Unhear This takes a look behind a mysterious voice that appears midway in “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” by The Beatles, which was written during the Get Back sessions for their iconic Abbey Road album.
I Want You (She’s So Heavy) is one of the Beatles’ rare hidden gems: an often overlooked song that features some of the finest musicianship of their entire career. …But there’s an anomaly hidden in its many layers that you might not have a noticed before. And as a warning, once you hear it…you can’t unhear this.
Schiller states that it being someone from inside the control room upset that John’s scream was so loud is nothing but a rumor. Instead, he posits that the microphone for Ringo’s drums captured ambient noise within the studio itself.
The ghost vocal actually happens twice once before John’s distorted scream and again after so clearly it couldn’t have been a reaction to John’s scream the reason we’re hearing it on the drum track is because the microphones used to record the drums are often sensitive enough to pick up extraneous noise in the recording studio
And that ambient noise may be that of a band member.
I think it’s likely that it’s one of the other Beatles possibly Paul or even John himself. It picked up during the recording of the backing track. When isolated it doesn’t actually sound like words but more like singing along to the bass line in that section.
Schiller then explains the very convoluted history of the song, the multiple recordings of different tracks, and the merging of these tracks that makes this ghost voice all the more mysterious.
To understand how this goes focal even made it into the mix we need to examine the convoluted eight-month long journey of the recording and re-recording of this song.
