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- Ascended Fanon: While "The White Album" was originally a Fan Nickname for the album, it picked up enough steam to be adopted by the surviving Beatles as its de-facto name in interviews and public statements.
- Creator Backlash: Session musician Jack Fallon was dissatisfied with the improvisation at the end of "Don't Pass Me By", though it was left in the song.I thought that they had had enough so I just busked around a bit. When I heard it played back at the end of the session I was hoping they'd scrub that bit out, but they didn't, so there I am on record, scraping away! I was very surprised they kept it in, it was pretty dreadful.
- John Lennon was quite disparaging of some of his contributions to this album. He was particularly harsh to "Cry Baby Cry"; in one interview, he even claimed to have not written it.
- Creator's Favorite Episode: Despite the above, Lennon also named this as his favourite Beatles album.
- Creative Differences:
- Although the band kept it together throughout the recording for the album (its initial sessions were remarkably harmonious and cooperative) and managed to complete two more following it, this album is where the rot began to set in, with band members drifting apart, egos beginning to get out of control and outside influences beginning to take their toll; the observation has frequently been made that this is reflected in the overall tone of the album, which feels more like a compilation of solo efforts rather than a collaborative effort. Many of the songs were in fact recorded by one of the band working individually with perhaps a minimal amount of involvement from one of the others at most, others featured contributions but not the entire band lineup, and the final result was assembled through overdubbing.
- There were, however, songs on which all the band members were present and recorded simultaneously ("Helter Skelter" and "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" among others), and the experience of recording "Yer Blues" in a large closet in the control room of Abbey Road Studio Two later influenced the abortive first attempt to record Let It Be. George Martin's waning authority and the use of multiple rooms left a lot of the album recorded by the band members alone with Abbey Road engineers.
- Engineer Ken Scott once recounted an incident on 20 August 1968 (two days before Ringo walked out of the sessions for "Back in the USSR") while Paul was working on the brass overdubs for "Mother Nature's Son" that illustrates how bad things were getting only two years before their breakup:"Paul was downstairs going through the arrangement with George [Martin] and the brass players. Everything was great, everyone was in great spirits. Suddenly, half way through, John and Ringo walked in and you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. An instant change. It was like that for ten minutes and then as soon as they left it felt great again. It was very bizarre".
- Cut Song: The album, in all its infamously overlong glory, lost enough songs to more or less comprise another whole LP's worth of material — "Not Guilty", "Junk", "What's The New Mary Jane", "Circles", "Child Of Nature" (Lennon's initial version of what would eventually become "Jealous Guy"), "Mean Mr. Mustard", "Polythene Pam", "Sour Milk Sea" (which many fans agree would've made for a killer single), "Step Inside Love", and others.
- John and Yoko's avant-garde "What's The New Mary Jane" was evidently a last-minute omission - in interviews leading up to the album's release, John still described it as having 31 tracks, the extra being a three-minute edit of "Mary Jane."
- Feelies: The album is packaged with four photos of the individual Beatles and a poster that includes lyrics, credits and a collage of more photos.
- Hitless Hit Album:
- No singles were taken from it when it was first released. "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" was belatedly released by Capitol in the US in 1976 but only got to #49 on the Billboard Hot 100. Also in 1976, "Back In The USSR" was a UK single to promote the Rock 'n' Roll Music compilation, reaching #19.note
- Several Cover Versions of songs from the album were released in 1969, with varying amounts of success. Marmalade's version of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" was a #1 hit in the UK,note while Arthur Conley (of "Sweet Soul Music" fame) had a minor US hit with it.note Fats Domino did "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" and Chubby Checker released "Back in the USSR". The Wisconsin Garage Rock band Underground Sunshine became a One-Hit Wonder when their take on "Birthday" hit the Top 30 in Billboard.
- Missing Episode:
- The 27 minute version of "Helter Skelter" has never been released officially or on any bootlegs, but a number of songs were recorded with the intention of being put on (or recorded during the sessions of) this album, most of which are heavily bootlegged (such as a full version of "Can You Take Me Back") or included on The Beatles Anthology ("What's the New Mary Jane?"). One track that had only just found its way onto bootlegs in 2010 was a ten minute recording of the version of "Revolution 1" that ended up on the album, which largely provides the basis of "Revolution 9".
- Some songs originally written for the album eventually ended up being later rerecorded and released on John, Paul, and George's solo albums (as detailed here
).
- Referenced by...:
- The piano part in Radiohead's "Karma Police" was written as an homage to that of "Sexy Sadie".
- The composition of XTC's "Dear God" was partly inspired by "Rocky Raccoon".
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Golden Wind references this album in two distinct ways, both related to La Squadra di Esecuzione member, Ghiaccio. His Stand is called White Album, which allows him to skate across any surface as if it were a patch of ice, and one of its secondary abilities is called White Album Gently Weeps, which allows him to cool the air around him to -215°C, causing everything around him to flash freeze.
- JoJolion features a Rock Insect named Obladi Oblada, which keeps in line with Rock Creatures being named after songs or albums with simplistic-sounding names.
- Putting the game disc for Sewer Shark in a CD player brings up a secret audio track in which a Digital Pictures employee receives a phone call consisting of backmasked audio. Playing said audio in reverse reveals a voice chanting "number nine," nodding to "Revolution 9"; it's even uttered in the same cadence to boot.
- An official soundtrack for SpongeBob SquarePants is entitled The Yellow Album, and its cover is a pastel yellow with only the album name, referencing The Beatles' original album.
- Rocket Raccoon is named after "Rocky Raccoon", and the title of his first story◊ is downright a sci-fi take on the song's opening line.
- 10cc's "Feel the Benefit" features a prominent guitar riff that's clearly based on the "Dear Prudence" Epic Riff.
- Shaggy 2 Dope of the Insane Clown Posse has an outro track on a solo album of his that is a parody of "Revolution 9".
- Glass Onion takes its name from a song on this album; the song also plays during the credits. Partway through the film, Miles plays a snippet of another cut, "Blackbird", on the guitar that Paul McCartney used to write it.
- Digimon Adventure referenced the main riff of Birthday as the basis for the song Love Serenade ~ Etemon no Theme.
- Serendipity Writes the Plot: The folksy, rootsy, acoustical feel of many of the songs which made up the album might have much to do with the fact that many of the songs were written by the bandmembers while on spiritual retreat in Rishikesh, India, written on the acoustic guitars they brought with them. "Dear Prudence" and "Julia" in particular came from lessons in fingerpicking guitar that fellow retreater Donovan taught John Lennon during their stay, and another travelling companion, Mike Love of The Beach Boys, helped Paul write the Beach Boys Affectionate Parody "Back In The U.S.S.R.".
- Throw It In!:
- A few instances of Studio Chatter are left between songs (most notably, "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" ends with John saying "Hey, up!" (or maybe "ale!") and "Helter Skelter" has Ringo shouting "I GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!")
- The last verse of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" refering to Desmond as "his" and "she", implying that he is a Wholesome Crossdresser, is the result of Paul mixing up the lyrics during recording (as is evident from the demo version). It stayed in because the rest of the band liked it (or were sick of working on the song, which none of them liked very much).
- The officially released alternate takes have moments where they screwed up the lyrics but just kept going, like Paul singing that Rocky Raccoon's doctor was "sminking of gin", and John singing that the characters in "Cry Baby Cry" were having a "A séance round the table for séance in the dark".
- Wild Honey Pie was a song made by Paul while the other Beatles were away from the studio. The track originally wasn't going to be included in the album, but George's wife liked the song, so they kept it in.
- Troubled Production: The Beatles started the recording sessions in a state of passive-aggressive tension. The death of Brian Epstein in 1967 had robbed the band of their Team Dad. The India sojourn and their involvement with the Maharishi (largely instigated by George) ended badly and strained group relations. Still, the launch of Apple Corps had renewed their enthusiasm in their work and there was a sense of optimism. But, as John's newfound love with Yoko Ono spilled over into his music, Paul started asserting his perfectionism (and his love life was also a bit of a mess), and George felt undervalued, Hostility in the Studio marred the sessions. Eventually, the band members were largely working alone with whatever engineers they had handy and spending hours jamming with no results. The tense atmosphere and lack of productivity caused their longtime engineer Geoff Emerick to quit halfway through, and even George Martin felt he had to take a vacation. The atmosphere was so bad Ringo even left the band for a couple of days, leading Paul to play drums in both "Back in the USSR" and "Dear Prudence". It pretty much marked the point when the arguments and fights that would later break up the band first reared their ugly head.
- The Walrus Was Paul: "Glass Onion" is the Trope Namer, using the line "and here's another clue for you all: the walrus was Paul" to allude to the fact that the band's earlier song "I Am the Walrus" is not supposed to be a deep, philosophical song and was just nonsense for the sake of it.
- What Could Have Been:
- George Martin attempted to persuade the band to cut the album down to one disc. The band, however, persisted and had it released as a double LP.
- There were still quite a few omissions and outtakes from the album. One of them was "What's the New Mary Jane?", another highly experimental track featuring John, George, and Yoko. It appears in a much edited form (in order to make it sound more like a song) on Anthology 3. George's "Not Guilty" was abandoned in the middle of the sessions (he re-recorded it in 1979 for his Self-Titled Album). Among songs written in India that weren't recorded for the album were John's "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam" (which he felt were "pieces of crap", but they ended up on side two of Abbey Road), plus "Child of Nature" (which got re-written as "Jealous Guy"), Paul's "Junk" (ultimately released on McCartney), and George's "Sour Milk Sea" (given to Jackie Lomax, one of Apple Records' first signees) and "Circles" (which George revived on his 1982 album Gone Troppo).
- "Don't Pass Me By" was originally going to have a Fake-Out Opening, with a lush George Martin-scored orchestral piece leading into the regular song. The intro was released on Anthology 3 as "A Beginning", then restored to the beginning of an alternate take of the song on the 50th anniversary box set.
- Working Title:
- A Doll's House, after the Henrik Ibsen play of the same name. The release of Music in a Doll's House by the British band Family in the middle of the recording sessions forced a title change. It was Richard Hamilton, who designed the album art, who suggested a Self-Titled Album.
- "Back in the USSR" was originally written as "I'm Backing the UK" as a nod to the "I'm Backing Britain" campaign, which began just before the band left for India. It then morphed into "I'm Backing the USSR" before receiving its final title as a play on Chuck Berry's "Back in the USA".
- "Rocky Raccoon" was originally written as "Rocky Sassoon". Paul changed the name to make it more Western-sounding.
- A Doll's House, after the Henrik Ibsen play of the same name. The release of Music in a Doll's House
- Writer Revolt: "Revolution 1" was recorded first and John intended it to be a single, but Paul and George criticised it for being "too slow to be a single".note In retaliation, John arranged a much faster, more heavily distorted and aggressive take of "Revolution", that ended up becoming the single instead. As Giles Martin said on the sleeve-notes for Love, "even today it defines 'distortion'". John was in fact in such a "you want it louder and faster? I'll show you louder and faster!" mood, that when the single was recorded, he added some deliberately sloppy vocal overdubs and plugged his guitar directly into the mixing console to get a harsher sound and supplied the opening Metal Scream, and engineer Geoff Emerick added so much compression to Ringo's drums that he inadvertently made the click track audible. If any early Heavy Metal act admits to liking the Beatles, they were probably drawing inspiration from either that song or "Helter Skelter".
- Writing by the Seat of Your Pants:
- "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" came out of George's desire to test the I Ching's contention that there are no coincidences and everything in the world is connected, by writing a song about a randomly selected phrase from a random book. As he says, he opened a book without thinking, saw the phrase "gently weeps", put the book down and started writing.
- "Birthday" was completely concocted from scratch during its recording session, with John and Paul working up the Epic Riff and building the song from there. In the middle of the session, they took a break to watch a TV broadcast of The Girl Can't Help It at Paul's flat (which was a short walk from Abbey Road), which further tilted the song into a Revisiting the Roots exercise.
