There are almost no original Beatles recordings available to link online, so I did my own version.

The Beatles version has a quintessential melodic bass line from Paul McCartney, a sharp little drum part from Ringo Starr, and a small host of cool auxiliary instruments. Go check it out in full glory on the White Album.

I love the descending chord progression of the verses. I love the dreamy stomp of the chorus, with a soft vibrato on the vocals. And I geek out about how John Lennon embellishes the vocal over the final repeats of the chorus, adjusting creatively just enough to the two-beat half measures at the end of each repetition.

The lyrics flip some of the ideas of the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpense," first taking the king out of the counting house and putting him in the kitchen, then showing him in the garden, domain of the maid in the nursery rhyme. It wasn't five years later that John Lennon was fulfilling this vision in his own life, embarking on his period as a non-working househusband with Yoko Ono and his son Sean. He stayed out of the public eye for five years to focus on raising his young child. After essentially missing all of his first son Julian's childhood to pursue his career, he didn't want to make the same grave mistake again.

And then of course, to be more prophetic, the last verse is about a family seance to communicate with the dead. The kids of the story break up the session with their own voices, suggesting one of two things: Either the point is that the seance is nonsense, rightfully disrupted by the play of children; or maybe the children are themselves the incarnations of the lost, the voices of the dead left to carry on.

At least, they might be something approaching that if the dead, while they were here, took the time to pour themselves into their children's lives.