The 2002 song George Harrison always wanted to be his last: “A prayer”
George Harrison spent a lot of time thinking about what he wanted to say on each one of his records.
He never saw himself as a solo artist the same way that the other Beatles did, and even when he was working on one of his newer records, he was always trying to find something to say that had a lot more depth than the standard rock and roll songs that climbed up the charts. He had moved on from the silly love songs before the 1970s had even finished, and a lot of his final years were about him falling back in love with the kind of tunes that he loved playing as a kid.
Which is half the reason why the Traveling Wilburys worked so well. Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne may have been the new kids in the group, but if you were to have told Harrison that he would one day be in a band with Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan in his early 20s, he would have been geeking out like crazy. And while a lot of those songs focused on being rooted in skiffle music half the time, he seemed to duck out of the public eye for a long time before eventually deciding to release one more album.
His cancer diagnosis may have put a damper on many of the sessions, but Brainwashed was going to be the kind of record that he wanted to sign off on. Both he and Lynne worked meticulously to get the right sound for every single one of the songs, but even when they ran out of time, Dhani Harrison managed to do right by his old man by trying to make the songs that he would have wanted to hear on his final record.
And a lot of the lyrics on the album are still the same Harrison that the world had always known. There are the occasional great folksy tunes like ‘Any Road’ that would have fit in perfectly on Wilburys albums, but ‘Rising Sun’ and ‘P2 Vatican Blues’ showed that he was still trying to get more philosophical in his old age. But if ‘Marwa Blues’ set things up perfectly midway through the record, the title track wasn’t something anyone was prepared for.
Even though Harrison wasn’t around to see the album get finished, Lynne said that he wanted the song to be the last song that the fans had ever heard from him, saying, “We knew he wanted ‘Brainwashed’ to close the album, because he ended the song with a chant, a prayer. It was recorded as part of the bed track.” And looking at the lyrics, the entire song feels like one last reminder of what his spiritual practices meant to him and his need to share it with the world to see if they will listen.
The crux of the song is all about humans getting bogged down by material possessions, and Harrison pointed out that all that mattered was God in the end. The fact that he was saying that people were brainwashed by mobile phones may have been wildly prophetic for 2003, but even in the face of certain death, the fact that Harrison is staring it right in the face and refusing to accept defeat is the best that you can hope for from someone trying to give their final thoughts down on record.
And compared to every other Beatles solo album, the prayer in question that Lynne talks about is absolutely breathtaking. The instrumental on the project had already prepared people for something like this, but hearing George and Dhani sing in unison with each other sounds like the musical equivalent of a soul being put to rest after going through Lord knows how many challenges throughout their life.
Because as much as Harrison loved indulging in certain aspects of life, he knew that his time on Earth was finite and that he would eventually need to think about how he was going to leave his body. And while most of us Beatles fans weren’t able to see the moment that he journeyed to the other side, you can tell by this song that he was perfectly content with his demise and willing to believe until his final breath.
