Why did George Harrison hate his early Beatles songs?
When an artist comes to hate their earliest work, it’s somewhat understandable—it’s the artistic equivalent of cringing at old photos or reading through teenage diary entries. But for George Harrison, his dislike of some early Beatles songs stemmed from an entirely different reason.
Beyond feeling like early work is an awkward portrait of their younger self, there is also always the hope that an artist has improved. As they move through their career, a person should, hopefully, only get more skilled. Even talent is a muscle that strengthens with use, so the more songs a person writes or sings, the more gigs they do and albums they release, the better they should get at doing it all.
That seems to especially be the case with songwriting. In most cases, the first songs a person writes are rudimentary. They’re basic, often incredibly structured and rigid, as they follow the rules they think they’re supposed to follow to write a song. Without the confidence yet to go off script and experiment, an artist’s first works are generally their most standard, straightforward work.
In short, the first attempts are like Bambi on ice. Artists are trying to find their feet, and when George Harrison listened back to the earliest Beatles stuff he did, he heard them as the wobbly fumbling of a young boy trying to figure it out.
First came ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’, the earliest Beatles track that Harrison sang on, captured on their debut album. As the band prided itself on having no lead singer, the track was specifically written for the guitarist to take on. “‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ was ‘my song’ on the album,” he later said, “I didn’t like my vocal on it. I didn’t know how to sing; nobody told me how to.”
That feeling that Harrison ‘didn’t know how’ to do something is exactly the root of all of this. He didn’t like the track cause he always heard that insecurity. It’s the same on ‘Don’t Bother Me’, one of the first songs he wrote for the band. “‘Don’t Bother Me’ I wrote in a hotel in Bournemouth, where we were playing a summer season in 1963, as an exercise to see if I could write a song,” he said. Before that, he wasn’t sure if he could, so this track was a tentative attempt.
However, as the years went on, Harrison found some warmth in these songs, as he found kindness for his younger self, coming to look back on them with care and affection for the musician, even if he didn’t love the music. “I don’t think it’s a particularly good song; it mightn’t be a song at all. But at least it showed me that all I needed to do was keep on writing and maybe eventually I would write something good,” he said of ‘Don’t Bother Me’, and the moral of this whole story is that talent takes work, and practice truly does make perfect.
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