How James Taylor inspired a Beatles classic
The connection between James Taylor and The Beatles is actually stronger than most people realise. Sure, the iconic folk singer-songwriter truly came to fame during the early 1970s, a time when The Beatles were fully broken up, but Taylor’s artistic path led him through a number of bands and even took him across the pond to England to audition for The Beatles’ newly established Apple Records.
While touring with Bonnie Raitt in 2017, Taylor revealed that one of his most famous songs was a part of his prepared setlist for his audition for Apple. At a show in Frisco, Texas, Taylor stated that ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ was one of the songs that he sang for the audition, which Paul McCartney and George Harrison attended. If that seems like a strange coincidence, it’s probably because Harrison took inspiration from Taylor’s song to make one of his own.
That would be ‘Something’, Harrison’s all-time-great love song that appeared on 1969’s Abbey Road. A bit of writers block hampered Harrison’s initial set of lyrics, but he always intended to borrow the first line of Taylor’s song. “I could never think of words for it. And also because there was a James Taylor song called ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ which is the first line of that. And so then I thought of trying to change the words, but they were the words that came when I first wrote it, so in the end I just left it as that, and just called it ‘Something’.”
For his part, Taylor never felt jilted by Harrison’s lift. “I never thought for a second that George intended to do that,” Taylor explains in the book Hearts of Darkness: James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, and the Unlikely Rise of the Singer-Songwriter when asked if he thought Harrison had purposefully stolen from him. “I don’t think he intentionally ripped anything off, and all music is borrowed from other music. So completely I let it pass.”
Taylor even claimed that the end of ‘Something In The Way She Moves’, featuring a circular guitar pattern, was inspired by The Beatles song ‘I Feel Fine’. “What goes around comes around,” Taylor said. It seems like a fitting bit of happenstance that The Beatles influence on Taylor could eventually be repaid as Taylor, in turn, influenced one of The Beatles’ best songs.
Check out ‘Something’ down below.
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