Paul McCartney wrote "The Fool on the Hill" in March 1967, but the Beatles did not record it until September of that year. While walking over a hill, McCartney and a friend encountered a strange man in a rain coat who exhorted them to attend the view. They did, but when they turned back, he had vanished. The song itself is a ballad with mysterious lyrics and a harmonic structure that moves from D major to D minor and back again. The verse opens with a cheerful melody rising from the third to the fifth to the sixth and back down to the fifth over an alternating D major chord with added sixth and E minor seventh chords above a tonic pedal. The verse continues with a resigned melody over a pair of standard supertonic minor, dominant seventh, tonic, submediant minor chord progressions, but it changes after the second progression from the tonic major to the tonic minor and the song slips into a harmonically enigmatic chorus in the minor that returns to the tonic major only with the return of the verse. The original recorded version of "The Fool on the Hill" had Lennon and Harrison playing McCartney's melody on harmonicas in the third verse, but this was later replaced by three flutists for the released version. "The Fool on the Hill" was the first song on the second Magical Mystery Tour EP released in early December 1967. ~ James Leonard, All Music Guide
