The most beautiful song of George Harrison’s career, according to George Martin
When it came to love songs and The Beatles, it was always the smiling songbird of the 1960s, Paul McCartney, who connected the two, displaying a knack for penning romantic ballads that perfectly encapsulated the blissful feeling of falling in love.
‘I Will’ and ‘Here There and Everywhere’ boldly prove that point and give credence to the idea that he needed to gatekeep creativity within that remit, wherein he nursed a predisposed hesitance to let any of the other band members into the writing process, not least George Harrison, especially when it came to penning a love song.
When his quiet bandmate decided he wanted to get more involved in songwriting, come the mid-60s, McCartney would crack the door open ever so slightly and let him contribute so long as it fit within his trusted realms of politics and spirituality.
Come 1969, Harrison was ready to boot the door off its hinges. He had armed himself with a bulletproof songwriting method in the earlier years, churning out ‘Taxman’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, but by the time the iconic Abbey Road was being laid down, he had genius locked away in his arsenal. And there was no better proof of that than ‘Something’.
To McCartney’s dismay, it might just be the band’s greatest ever love song. Harrison’s sultry verses that swing into a soaring melody possess a brilliance that is only matched by the lyricism, which is equal parts grand and vulnerable. There is a maturity to the sense of uncertainty he laces the song with, stepping away from the simple, fairytale-like writing of the love songs that came before it.
Whenever Harrison put a song forward to the band, he often had to fight for studio time and force the rest of the team to give it the time it deserved. But as the supervisor of recording, the band’s famed producer George Martin would have ensured the ‘Something’ got the time it fully deserved, for he was immediately struck by its greatness.
He remembered, ‘Something’ as “a most beautiful song by George, which made everyone realise that he could write just as great a song as John [Lennon] or Paul, and it gave him enormous confidence. The master track was completed in May with a keyboard line from Billy Preston, and finally, I added a string orchestra in mid-August. I was so pleased with the final result.”
It was a masterclass in pretty much every aspect of songwriting. From the humble beginnings on Harrison’s guitar, to the collaborative arrangements from the band and then the finishing touches from production, it was intimate and almost timid when it needed to be, and grand and sweeping when the chorus demanded it.
While Harrison really had nothing to prove by ‘69, having already written some stellar hits for the band, ‘Something’ was undoubtedly the moment when it all changed. He hadn’t just written his best song, but one of the band’s very best of all time and in turn put to bed the notion that he had nothing to do with their greatness.
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