History of the song Today (1967) - Jefferson Airplane

In 1967. released a huge number of musical masterpieces. The albums are particularly memorable: The Jimi Hendrix Experience Axis: "Bold As Love," debut album. David Bowie - "David Bowie," another album of the same name The Doors - "The Doors" and many other records we still listen to and love today.

These "many" include without hesitation ".Surrealistic Pillow" groups Jefferson Airplane. The song "Today" was released on this record. The album sold at an unimaginable rate, it managed to go gold and reach the 3rd place in Billboard-200, and the "Today", which was on the first side of the record, became a hit, so much so that it was repeatedly sung by other musicians.

Original Performance Today Jefferson Airplane

Surrealistic Pillow is the first Jefferson Airplane album to be recorded with Jefferson Airplane on vocals Grace Slick and the drummer Spencer Drydenwho, incidentally, was the nephew of comedian Charlie Chaplin. Slick had previously performed with another band, and Dryden was a popular jazz drummer in New York.

Such a reshuffle in the band was very welcome - these musicians had a strong influence on the quality of the band's musical material and the record.

The musicians have left the ideas of classic folk-rock that dominated their first album behind and added to their new songs a touch of psychedeliawhich was gaining popularity with listeners in the 60s. As a result, Jefferson Airplane had quite an original sound. Elements of psychedelia can be felt in the song "Today" from the first listen.

Unfortunately, "Today" didn't become a worldwide hitJefferson Airplane had two more interesting things: "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" - these songs were singles that the band released to promote the album. Both songs were mega-successful and reached the top 5 of the Billboard-200. Because of the popularity of these songs, people didn't pay much attention to the song "Today" at first. The situation improved a bit when Tom Scott recorded a cover of this song.

What the song's about Today Jefferson Airplane

The song is about one person's feelings for another person. The gender of the characters is not specifically mentioned because the songwriters - Marty Balin и Paul Kantner wanted everyone to be able to see themselves and their feelings in this song. The hero is literally bursting with emotion: he is madly in love with the person he sings about in the song.

The hero admits that he is not perfect, but he literally screams his love. Everything he does, he does for the person he loves. At a certain point, it starts to feel more like dependencethan true love, but perhaps true love is a very strong dependence on another person.

It's very emotional songdespite the way Jefferson Airplane played it. They deliberately added psychedelic elements and performed it as calmly as possible. It came out unique composition both in meaning and sound.

Tom Scott's cover of Today

In the 60's it was not considered something shameful to perform someone else's song if you liked it. A lot of people popular musicians included covers on their albums. And some of them could even release an entire album consisting of covers. Today's artists are ashamed to admit that their colleagues are doing something worthy, so covers are rare.

The difference in attitude to covers between the older and younger generation of musicians was recently demonstrated by Deep Purple, who in 2021 released the album "Turning To Crime" entirely consisting of covers of their favourite songs of the 60-70s. So the musicians decided to give tribute your favourite artists.

Returning to the song Today, we note that it was also repeatedly re-sung many times only because it was liked not only by Jefferson Airplane fans, but also by other musicians. But the most popular cover to this song was a cover by Tom Scott, who released it the same year the original version of the song came out:

In his rendition, the song became noticeably faster, adding the new tool inserts. One of the most significant and noticeable changes to the instrumental component of the song was that Tom Scott decided to add in Today trumpet solo. The lyrics are overlaid on top of this solo, which sounds even more psychedelic than what Jefferson Airplane did.