Wonderwall

About the song

«Wonderwall» is a song by Oasis, the Manchester band led by the brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher. It belongs to «(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?», the group’s second studio album, which came out on 2 October 1995, and it was released as a single by Creation Records on 30 October of the same year. Noel Gallagher wrote words and music, Liam sang the lead vocal, and the production was shared by Noel and Owen Morris. Almost three decades later it is still one of the most famous British songs of the 1990s, a fixture of radio stations, stadiums and karaoke nights, and for many people the first tune they ever try to play on an acoustic guitar.

The track was recorded in May 1995 at Rockfield Studios, a residential studio in the Welsh countryside near Monmouth. According to Wikipedia, Morris needed only about half a day to finish the production, and he pushed the sound hard with heavy compression, a technique often called «brickwalling», so that the strummed guitars feel dense and close. The same article says that Noel played the bass part himself instead of the band’s bassist, Paul McGuigan, and that the guitarist Paul Arthurs, known as Bonehead, added a Mellotron set to a cello sound, which gives the arrangement its low, sweeping strings. The song is in F sharp minor and is usually played with a capo on the second fret, a detail that guitar teachers repeat all over the world.

There was a choice to make inside the band. Noel offered his brother two new songs and let him pick the one he wanted to sing: «Wonderwall» or «Don’t Look Back in Anger». Liam chose «Wonderwall», and Noel sang the other one himself. Both became enormous hits, and the two songs are often described as the heart of the album. Liam’s relationship with the song has not always been warm, though. In 2008, as Songfacts reports, he said he could no longer stand singing it. Years later both brothers were performing it again in their own concerts, and it returned to the set list when Oasis reunited for a tour in 2025.

The title has its own history. While Noel was working on the song it was called «Wishing Stone». The final name was borrowed from George Harrison: in 1968 the Beatles guitarist released «Wonderwall Music», his soundtrack for the film «Wonderwall». The word itself does not appear in ordinary dictionaries. In the song it works as a name for a person, or a presence, that holds the narrator up when everything else seems uncertain.