Welcome to the first installment of our Magical Mystery Tour through LSD’s sonic landscapes. As promised in the series introduction, we’re embarking on a journey—not through oceans or space, but through extraordinary musical compositions that capture artists’ experiences with lysergic acid diethylamide.

This opening edition examines three iconic works: The Beatles’ unavoidable “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Kenny Rogers’ simultaneously humorous and disturbing “Just Dropped In,” and A$AP Rocky′s transcendently beautiful “L$D”. Each offers a unique window into how different artists across eras have translated their psychedelic journeys into sound.

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Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (1968) The Beatles

It is a song that feels like ripping open the lid of Pandora’s box, and being dragged into it head first. Led through a land of psychedelic imagery and paradoxes of self by an Alice-in-Wonderland-like figure, the feeling is evoked of swinging with abandon between unspeakably different states of consciousness.

Underscored by a looping melody, born from a piano bleeding unease, the verses tighten, contract, and drag one into a crunching swirl. The uncomfortable nasality of Lennon evokes deception and mistrust, an uncanny feeling that you know what this is, who it is, and yet it is also something so far removed. An overwhelming, overstimulating chest-tightening smorgasbord of disorientation and a sense of the unencountered.

John Lennon always maintained that it is pure coincidence that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is an acrostic.

Given The Beatles’ extensive use of the substance at the time, however, as well as the extant psychedelic imagery, coincidence seems highly unlikely.

No music sounds like this. It is a harmony of anarchy. The music hangs on a quantum thread, simultaneously feeling both completely discordant – yet also divinely patterned, and truthfully complete. Are girls with kaleidoscope eyes beatific incarnations, or Medusa-esque beings so terrifying that you cannot help but stare?

Throughout one feels a swelling expansion, a crescendoing towards something that seems like a promise of resolution. But such resolution remains ungraspable, always on the other side of more further angst and intensity.

That is, until it all drops away. Without provocation or explanation, the drums and guitars erupt into the glorious flames of ecstasy. McCartney is here, with his bravado-soaked melodic voice to assure you. Don’t worry about the strangeness, the unknown, and nonsensicality – Lucy is in the sky, with diamonds no less, and all is well and right.

That is, of course, until you tumble back into the cellophane flowers of yellow and green. And you begin the climb, up the back of your head in the clouds, till you’re gone.

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Just Dropped In (1968) Kenny Rogers and The First Edition

The Kenny Rogers of “The Gambler” is plodding, assured, wise, and world-weary. Here, he croons with a tense, impassioned and atoning desperation, having got so much more than he bargained for.

He tries with all his might to wrangle a foe into submission, but invariably it slips away at each opportunity. After only wanting to drop in to see what his condition was in, he is constantly finding his mind, tearing it on jagged skies, pushing his soul into deep dark holes, then watching himself crawling out while he is crawling in. A continual losing of self, and an irresistible urge to chase straight after it.

These paradoxes of self, unfurling and fluttering in his mind’s breeze like Nepalese prayer flags, are enough in turn to break his mind.

A knowledge that in dropping in, he may have access to a truer understanding of how his condition is, but not wanting the attendant understandings born from this. The backing, grandiose falsetto (“yeah, yeah, oh yeahhhhh”) further raises the stakes, invoking too a feeling of a version of Rogers, that is both him and yet so other.

Sonically, there is so much happening. A complete unpredictability – one cannot know what sound or riff will enter next, and yet there remains a flowing smoothness to the madness. Slimy synths crawl through your being, whilst buzzier ones zip across the skyline of your mind.

A guitar gently mocks with its sweetly swaggering rhythms, furthering the sense that this all feels like a great big joke. Cymbals flutter gently, and funky riffs warble from a bass.

It is a swarming birdsong of a cautionary tale.

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L$D (2015) A$AP Rocky

A$AP Rocky – rapper, fashion icon, partner of Rihanna, intensely imaginative visionary. Imperious, assured, sensual, experimental, cool-as-hell. And an advocate for using LSD to enhance creativity and enable explorations of self, “Love $ex Dreams” forms the eponymous basis for the song’s title.

The ethereality that hums throughout feels like sinking into an enclave of silk, marshmallow and mist. Lush synths, distorted guitar riffs and breathy exhalations are the ground of this wakeful slumber.

There are continual shuffles and shuttling between sounds and soundscapes, but never does it feel like we depart from the same open softness that pulses throughout. Everything is in its right place, nothing is obtrusive, everything seems always meant to be where it is. The lyrics, too, shuffle between themes and conversations and platitudinal snippets, but again feel entirely of one continual peace.

Rocky, often so venerable and swagger-licious, is here vulnerable and delicious. You can feel him smiling, hear him delighting in the majesty of experience. His slight giggles speak to an inability of expression, “lost for words because [his] feelings just said it all”.

The breathy gasps underscoring the rhythm are so sumptuously sexual, yet feel entirely lustless. Exhalations of ecstasy and sonorous pleasure, there is no desire expressed here – only blissful worship at the altar of all which is good.