Vinyl Nostalgia 
In 1967, The Beatles released two albums that would eventually be hailed as the best in history, though one did not achieve the commercial success expected at the time. This refers to the super-single released in February featuring the two massive hits “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which, however, never reached number one on the British charts, and furthermore, neither of these songs made it onto the super-album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” released a few months later. George Martin later described the decision to exclude these tracks from the album as “the biggest mistake of [his] professional life” (source).
When the Beatles entered the studio in November 1966 to record their new LP, the first songs they wrote and recorded were “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” as well as “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Matin decided at the time that the first two were the best the band had ever created and decided to put them on an EP instead of the new album. Had he not done so, the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” would have looked different.
Both hits were included on the American album “Magical Mystery Tour” in November 1967. (Nine years later, the album was released in the same format on the British market), as well as on the special two-disc anniversary edition of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” released in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary.
Paul McCartney said: “Both songs are about Liverpool. We were a band that had been together for a long time, and that helped us a lot because we could do something like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”—it was great. For many formative, important years, we used to hang out in those neighborhoods. Penny Lane was a bus stop where I had to transfer to get to John and other friends. It was a big station that we all knew well. I sang in the choir at St. Barnabas Church, which was right across the street
“Strawberry Fields Forever” is one of the first pop songs to use a mellotron (a keyboard instrument that plays back sound samples from tapes). In “Penny Lane,” on the other hand, you won’t hear a single guitar—the arrangement is based on pianos and wind instruments.
John Lennon on “Strawberry Fields Forever”: “It was psychoanalysis in the form of a song. The point was that nobody seemed to be ‘on my wavelength.’ I thought I was either crazy or a genius. Strawberry Fields was a real place, a Salvation Army orphanage where I used to play as a child.”
“Strawberry Fields Forever” was created by combining two different versions recorded in different keys and tempos. Producer George Martin achieved the nearly impossible by speeding up one tape and slowing down the other by 2% so they would sync perfectly.
The third song recorded during the Sgt. Pepper sessions was George Harrison’s composition “Only a Northern Song,” which, however, did not appeal to the other musicians, and although Paul and Ringo added their own parts to it, George Martin ultimately decided not to include it on the upcoming album (source). “Only a Northern Song” eventually appeared on the Yellow Submarine album.
Rolling Stone magazine ranked “Strawberry Fields Forever” at No. 7 on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, calling it “a masterpiece that changed the rules of the game in the recording studio.”