The Beatles songs written about Pattie Boyd: “The purity of their essence”
Every artist has their muse; whether it’s Andy Warhol’s obsession with Edie Sedgwick or David Hockney’s lifelong love of smoking.
Few people can claim to have been quite such an inspiring muse as Pattie Boyd, though, whose beauty spawned a litany of legendary love songs from a multitude of songwriters, spanning the spectrum from Ron Wood to George Harrison.
It was during the production of A Hard Day’s Night that Harrison first crossed paths with the budding young model, who was in the process of defining the look of the 1960s alongside the likes of Twiggy. It wasn’t long after that first encounter that Boyd’s influence began to bleed over into Harrison’s songwriting, inspiring some of his finest moments with The Beatles, as well as a multitude of the greatest love songs ever recorded.
Harrison’s songwriting contributions were never quite given the same attention as the infallible mastery of Lennon-McCartney, hence why he soon became the first Beatle to release a solo project, but his writing about Boyd, in particular, had a special quality to it.
On songs like ‘Something’, for instance, his utter adoration for his then-wife is laid profoundly bare, and those tracks remain perfect, unadulterated odes to the young love that the pair shared.
Inevitably, Harrison’s writing about Boyd continued well on into his solo career, around the same time that his musical comrade Eric Clapton also started writing about his infatuation with Boyd – the pair would eventually marry in 1979, shortly after her marriage to Harrison fell apart beyond all repair. Nevertheless, the Beatles-era songs penned for Boyd are perhaps the most insightful and heartfelt when it comes to the love that she shared with George Harrison.
“I find the concept of being a muse understandable when you think of all the great painters, poets, and photographers who usually have had one or two,” the model once revealed during a conversation for Harper’s Bazaar. “The artist absorbs an element from their muse that has nothing to do with words, just the purity of their essence”.
If that description is true, then Harrison absorbed as much of Boyd’s essence as possible, using her as the muse to create some of his all-time greatest works. Even if the pair’s marriage ended up being famously tumultuous, punctuated by multiple affairs on both sides, that conflict only adds to the retrospective appeal of those songs, presenting them as a more innocent, untarnished moment in their shared lives.
Judged purely by its popularity, Clapton’s ‘Layla’ is perhaps the most renowned track to be inspired by Boyd, but the seven Beatles tracks which revolve around the model have a certain innocence and integrity that neither Clapton’s nor Harrison’s solo works can truly recapture.
As far as muses go, Pattie Boyd might be the archetypal example, at least within the realm of rock and roll. There, after all, few other people who could accurately claim to have influenced the same number of beloved compositions as her, of which The Beatles’ efforts are merely the tip of the iceberg.
The Beatles songs written about Pattie Boyd:
- ‘Something’
- ‘For You Blue’
- ‘It’s All Too Much’
- ‘Love You To’
- ‘I Need You’
- ‘If I Needed Someone’
- ‘Old Brown Shoe’
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