October 22, 2021 —– Chart #114
Hello Musical Friends,
Welcome to Friday and the 114th edition of Chart of the day. The song chosen for today is one that nearly puts me in a trance every time I hear it. One word describes this tune: Masterpiece! You must forgive today’s lengthy writeup, there is just a lot to say about this song. Here is what I suggest. Close your eyes and listen to this song focusing on the bass guitar, then repeat the process focusing on the guitar, and so on. Each instrument is interwoven into this recording like a fine painting. Just masterful work throughout.
“Something” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 album Abbey Road. It was written by George Harrison, the band’s lead guitarist. Together with his second contribution to Abbey Road, “Here Comes the Sun”, it is widely viewed by music historians as having marked Harrison’s ascendancy as a composer to the level of the Beatles’ principal songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Two weeks after the album’s release, the song was issued on a double A-side single, coupled with “Come Together”, making it the first Harrison composition to become a Beatles A-side. The pairing was also the first time in the United Kingdom that the Beatles issued a single containing tracks already available on an album. While the single’s commercial performance was lessened by this, it topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States as well as charts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and West Germany, and peaked at number 4 in the UK.
The track is generally considered a love song to Pattie Boyd, Harrison’s first wife, although Harrison offered alternative sources of inspiration in later interviews. Owing to the difficulty he faced in getting more than two of his compositions onto each Beatles album, Harrison first offered the song to Joe Cocker. As recorded by the Beatles, the track features a guitar solo that several music critics identify among Harrison’s finest playing. The song also drew praise from the other Beatles and their producer, George Martin, with Lennon stating that it was the best song on Abbey Road. The promotional film for the single combined footage of each of the Beatles with his respective wife, reflecting the estrangement in the band during the months preceding their break-up in April 1970. Harrison subsequently performed the song at his Concert for Bangladesh shows in 1971 and throughout the two tours he made as a solo artist.
George Harrison began writing “Something” in September 1968, during a session for the Beatles’ self-titled double album, also known as “the White Album”. In his autobiography, I, Me Mine, he recalls working on the melody on a piano, at the same time as Paul McCartney recorded overdubs in a neighboring studio at London’s Abbey Road Studios. Harrison suspended work on the song, believing that with the tune having come to him so easily, it might have been a melody from another song. In I, Me, Mine, he wrote that the middle eight “took some time to sort out”.
The opening lyric was taken from the title of “Something in the Way She Moves”, a track by Harrison’s fellow Apple Records artist James Taylor. While Harrison imagined the composition in the style of Ray Charles, his inspiration for “Something” was his wife, Pattie Boyd. In her 2007 autobiography, Wonderful Today, Boyd recalls: “He told me, in a matter-of-fact way, that he had written it for me. I thought it was beautiful …” Boyd discusses the song’s popularity among other recording artists and concludes: “My favorite [version] was the one by George Harrison, which he played to me in the kitchen at Kinfauns.”
Having begun to write love songs that were directed at both God and a woman, with his White Album track “Long, Long, Long”, Harrison later cited alternative sources for his inspiration for “Something”. In early 1969, according to author Joshua Greene, Harrison told his friends from the Hare Krishna Movement that the song was about the Hindu deity Krishna; in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1976, he said of his approach to writing love songs: “all love is part of a universal love. When you love a woman, it’s the God in her that you see.” By 1996, Harrison had denied writing “Something” for Boyd. That year, he told a music journalist that “everybody presumed I wrote it about Pattie” because of the promotional film accompanying the release of the Beatles’ recording, which showed the couple together.
The Beatles undertook the recording of Abbey Road with a sense of discipline and cooperation that had largely been absent while making the White Album and Let It Be. Having temporarily left the group in January 1969 partly as a result of McCartney’s criticism of his musicianship, Harrison exhibited a greater level of assertiveness regarding his place in the band, particularly while they worked on his compositions “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”. In addition, like Lennon and McCartney, Martin had come to fully appreciate Harrison as a songwriter, later saying: “I first recognized that he really had a great talent when we did ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ But when he brought in ‘Something,’ it was something else … It was a tremendous work – and so simple.”
The group recorded “Something” on 16 April before Harrison decided to redo the song, a new basic track for which was then completed at Abbey Road on 2 May. The line-up was Harrison on Leslie-effected rhythm guitar, Lennon on piano, McCartney on bass, Ringo Starr on drums, and guest musician Billy Preston playing Hammond organ. On 5 May, at Olympic Sound Studios, McCartney re-recorded his bass part and Harrison added lead guitar. According to EMI engineer Geoff Emerick, Harrison asked McCartney to simplify his playing, but McCartney refused. At this point, the song ran to eight minutes, due to the inclusion of an extended, jam-like coda led by Lennon’s piano.
After taking a break from recording, the band returned to “Something” on 11 July, when Harrison overdubbed what would turn out to be a temporary vocal. With the resulting reduction mix, much of the coda, along with almost all of Lennon’s playing on the main part of the song, was cut from the recording. The piano can be heard only in the middle eight, specifically during the descending run that follows each pair of “I don’t know” vocal lines. On 16 July, Harrison recorded a new vocal, with McCartney overdubbing his harmony vocal over the middle eight and Starr adding both a second hi-hat part and a cymbal.
Following another reduction mix, at which point the remainder of the coda was excised from the track, Martin-arranged string orchestration was overdubbed on 15 August, as Harrison, working in the adjacent studio at Abbey Road, re-recorded his lead guitar part live. Writing for Rolling Stone in 2002, David Fricke described the Beatles’ version of “Something” as “actually two moods in one: the pillowy yearning of the verses … and the golden thunder of the bridge, the latter driven by Ringo Starr’s military flourish on a high-hat cymbal”. Leng highlights Harrison’s guitar solo on the recording as “a performance that is widely regarded as one of the great guitar solos”, and one in which Harrison incorporates the gamaks associated with Indian classical music, following his study of the sitar in 1965–68, while also foreshadowing the expressive style he would adopt on slide guitar as a solo artist.
Any way you slice it, this song is magical. Enjoy the videos.
Studio version from Beatles promotional video:
Amazing live performance with Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Brian May, Ringo, Jeff Lynn and many more: https://youtu.be/Xl-BNTeJXjw
2019 Audio mix – excellent quality: https://youtu.be/MZ3Vh8jZFdE
Keep rockin’ my friends,
Stan