The Beatles’ best love song, according to Elton John
When it came to writing love songs for The Beatles, Paul McCartney had firm control.
He was the dewy-eyed songbird of the famous group, the boy next door who could quite easily charm the parents as well as the teenagers, for his music had the more optimistic outlook of the bunch. John Lennon had proven fairly early that his songwriting would veer towards existentialism, and that was fine, simply because McCartney had the idealism swiftly perfected.
The innocent love songs of the early years were largely down to him, as were the ones tinged with psychedelia, with ‘Here There And Everywhere’ proving that he could still achieve lyrical universality in the swirling realms of this new kaleidoscopic soundscape they were creating. It meant that, however, once The Beatles were going to end, McCartney felt as though he would always be remembered as the great romantic of The Fab Four.
Maybe when Lennon met Yoko Ono and fell madly in love with her, he might have briefly feared that his crown would be snatched, but I doubt he ever thought it would be threatened by George Harrison. McCartney was the chief blocker of Harrison’s songwriting in the mid- to late 1960s, with the so-called quiet Beatle often slating his former bandmate for giving little to no time to his ideas and instead indulging in his own.
“Musically, it was like being in a bag, and they wouldn’t let me out the bag, which was mainly Paul at that time,” he commented, “The conflict musically for me was Paul. And yet I could play with any other band or musician and have a reasonably good time.”
But there was no bag big enough to contain Harrison when he came to the studio armed with ‘Something’, possibly the standout track from their standout album, as well as one of the very best love songs of all time. Don’t just take my word for it, take Elton John’s.
The ‘Candle In the Wind’ singer was desperate to shower Harrison’s track with praise, claiming that “‘Something’ is probably one of the best love songs ever, ever, ever written… It’s better than ‘Yesterday’, much better… It’s like the song I’ve been chasing for the last 35 years.”
Ouch, better than ‘Yesterday’, eh, Paul? That’s both high praise and cutting criticism all at the very same time. It wasn’t just Elton who believed that, either; The Beatles’ long-time rival Frank Sinatra once said it was one of the greatest love songs ever written.
It may well be, but more than that, it served as the song that really secured Harrison’s legacy. While the likes of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and ‘Taxman’ began that process on the preceding albums, ‘Something’ was his magnum opus and one that put him in the songwriting conversation. He stepped out of the shadow carved by his two bandmates and became a creative force in his own right, paving the way for what would be a brilliant solo career in the following decade.
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