The core theme running through every single song by The Beatles has always been love. From their first puppy dog love songs to their dissections of the emotion in their later years, the Fab Four was always fascinated with their feelings of desire through the years. While John Lennon may have been paranoid about love and Paul McCartney embraced it wholeheartedly, George Harrison always had more depth behind his songs of devotion.
Harrison was the shyest as a songwriter for most of The Beatles’ tenure, with only a handful of songs cropping up on studio albums. By the time he started to embrace Indian musical styles, his lyrical focus had begun to shift from infatuation to an undying love for faith, speaking on the cycle of life on tracks like ‘Within You Without You’ and ‘Long Long Long’. As the band was falling apart, Harrison offered one of his finest songs with ‘Something’, made in tribute to Pattie Boyd.
Harrison and Boyd had met on the set of The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night, and married around the time the band made the album Revolver. Harrison had begun writing ‘Something’ during the sessions for The White Album, taking the first line from the James Taylor song of the same name and using that as his muse.
Boyd inspired a number of Harrison songs, but ‘Something’ is arguably one of the most open-hearted tracks he would ever write, given that he talks about his love always being there for him and how he feels fulfilled just thinking about her. When Boyd first heard the song, she remembered how timid her husband was about playing it for the first time, recalling to Classic Rock, “The night before, as all the Beatles were sliding out of Abbey Road, George went to [engineer] Glyn Johns, ‘I want to play you a track, but I didn’t want to do it in front of the others.’ He played Something, and Glyn said, ‘Are you kidding? That’s fabulous. We’ll do it tomorrow.’”
Even when discussing the album Abbey Road, Paul McCartney was becoming aware of Harrison’s emergence as a songwriter, telling John Lennon that Harrison’s songs on the album were probably better than their own. The timeless way with melody carried Harrison through his solo career, crafting All Things Must Pass with some of the greatest tunes of his career on songs like ‘My Sweet Lord’.
As is too often with rock and roll relationships, Harrison’s marriage started to crumble in the early 1970s, with the album Dark Horse written about his divorce and Boyd eventually marrying his friend Eric Clapton. Despite falling out with her husband, Boyd would continue to be the muse for other rock classics, with Clapton penning the song ‘Layla’ about his unrequited love for her and writing ‘Wonderful Tonight’ about her as well.
Years after, the song still has the same effect on musicians for how perfectly simple it is. During the famous Concert For George, memorialising his death, Paul McCartney called the song one of his favourites from his old bandmate and would play a beautiful version of the song on the ukulele, which he continues to play in his solo sets to this day. Harrison’s marriage might not have lasted, but ‘Something’ cuts to the heart of love, unlike anything that The Beatles recorded.
