Harrison’s sitar take of Norwegian Wood steps out

The Beatles have shared an early studio recording of ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Second Version – Take 2)’, the first public taste of the expanded special edition of Rubber Soul. The track went out on 14 September 2026 and features George Harrison on sitar. The reissue is set for 2 October 2026 through Apple Corps Ltd, UMG and Capitol, across new stereo and Dolby Atmos mixes plus a sizeable haul of previously unreleased session takes and home demos.

The shared take comes from the second block of Rubber Soul sessions, after the band had set aside the first version of the song. John Lennon plays acoustic guitar, Paul McCartney on bass and Ringo Starr on drums, while Harrison adds the sitar drone notes that would become one of the record’s defining colours. It is a working document rather than a finished master: the arrangement is already in place, the sitar present, the feel still raw.

Rubber Soul and the turn outward

Rubber Soul was released in 1965, the album that followed Help! and immediately preceded Revolver. Formed in Liverpool in 1960, the Beatles — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — had by then moved beyond skiffle and beat into a studio language that treated popular music as an art form. The record drew on folk, classical touches and, crucially, Indian music. Harrison’s embrace of Indian instrumentation widened what a British pop group could put on a major-label album; the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’ was part of that shift, not a decoration bolted on afterwards.

Most of the group’s songs were written by Lennon and McCartney, yet from 1965 onwards, Beatles albums routinely carried Harrison compositions as well. His later writing for the band — ‘Taxman’, ‘Within You Without You’, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, ‘Here Comes the Sun’, ‘Something’ — grew from the same curiosity that brought the sitar into the Rubber Soul sessions. The early take now released makes that moment audible again: not the polished album cut, but the point at which the drone entered the room.

What the special edition holds

The expanded package is built around new stereo and Dolby Atmos mixes by Giles Martin and Sam Okell. Formats confirmed so far include 4CD, 5LP and Blu-ray editions. Super Deluxe sets gather 24 early recordings: 20 unreleased takes and three home demos. Among the demos is an unheard John Lennon song, ‘Little Girl’. The double A-side single ‘Day Tripper’ / ‘We Can Work It Out’ is also part of the package. No further detail on physical availability or pricing has been given beyond the listed formats.

Catalogue work of this kind has become a steady strand of the Beatles’ post-1970 life. The band disbanded in 1970. Lennon died in 1980 and Harrison in 2001. What continues is the archive — live sets, anniversary editions, the 2023 single ‘Now And Then’, the 2023 editions of the Red and Blue albums, and the Anthology releases of 2025. Rubber Soul sits in that sequence as one of the pivotal studio statements: the album on which the group’s songwriting, arrangement and studio craft locked into a new gear.

For listeners who already know every bar of the original LP, the value lies in the unfinished edges — the rejected first version set aside, the second block take with Harrison’s sitar still finding its place, the home demos that never reached the album. The 2 October release will set those pieces beside Martin and Okell’s fresh mixes. Until then, the Second Version – Take 2 of ‘Norwegian Wood’ stands as the opening signal: a working Beatles track from the mid-sixties, sitar and all, brought back into circulation.