Here Comes the Sun

• 1. Introduction

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  "Here Comes the Sun" was written in a garden in Ewhurst, Surrey, on a day George Harrison decided not to go to work. That simple act of truancy produced one of the most streamed recordings in Spotify history. As of 2025, no Beatles song has been played more often on the platform. In May 2023 it became the first song from the 1960s to surpass one billion plays there. What does it mean that a track written to escape a business meeting, recorded in a studio over a handful of summer weeks, has outlasted nearly everything made before or since? The questions worth asking are not just about the song itself but about how it got made, what George Harrison was running from, and why listeners a half-century later keep returning to it.

• 2. The Day Harrison Skipped Apple

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  The early months of 1969 were hard on Harrison in ways that had nothing to do with music. He had temporarily quit the Beatles, been arrested for marijuana possession, and had his tonsils removed. Writing in Oz magazine at the end of that year, Barry Miles described the "isolated life" of the individual Beatles, noting that Harrison was "strangely upset by his bust, uncertain about his friends but singing Hare Krishna."

  Eric Clapton recalled in Martin Scorsese's 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World that he himself would never walk around outside playing guitar, but that "this is what George brought to the situation." Clapton described watching the song come to life: "He was just a magical guy and he would show up, get out of the car with his guitar and come in and start playing... I just watched this thing come to life. I felt very proud that it was my garden that was inspiring it."

  Clapton's house was Hurtwood Edge, and meteorological data from the London area lend an almost scientific clarity to what Harrison was feeling. April 1969 set a record for sunlight hours during the 1960s at the Greenwich station, logging 189 hours, a figure not exceeded until 1984. February and March of that year had been much colder than the decade's norm, making the arrival of spring feel especially abrupt.

  Harrison recalled in a 1969 BBC Radio 1 interview with reporter David Wigg, later included on the 1976 album The Beatles Tapes, that the constant business meetings had kept him away from his guitar for weeks. "And the first thing that came out was that song," he said. He completed the lyrics in June while on holiday in Sardinia.

• 3. Composition and the Moog

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  "Here Comes the Sun" is in the key of A major, though Harrison capoed his guitar on the 7th fret and then the recording was varispeeded less than a semitone higher to arrive there. He had used the same capo technique on his 1965 song "If I Needed Someone," which shares a similar melodic pattern.

  The bridge draws on Harrison's long engagement with Indian classical music. The song moves through a sequence of 11/8, 4/4, and 7/8 time signatures in those passages, phrasing interludes he drew directly from Indian music. Musicologist Walter Everett observed that the lyrics over the bridge, "Sun, sun, sun, here it comes," take "on the quality of a meditator's mantra."

  The Moog synthesiser threads through the track in an unusually deliberate way. In the second verse, beginning at 0:59, it doubles the solo guitar line; by the third verse it adds a counter melody an octave above. Authors Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, writing about the history of the Moog, describe how its "increasing brilliance of timbre" on the track serves to convey "the sun's increasing brilliance." Harrison was among the first musicians in the UK to own a Moog; although American acts had used it since 1967, the Beatles were described by author Thom Holmes as "one of the first groups to effectively integrate the sounds of the Moog into their music."

  The final Moog part was added on the 19th of August 1969, the last major overdub session. The instrument had been installed at EMI Studios that August with assistance from Mike Vickers of Manfred Mann.

• 4. A Recording Studio at the Edge

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  Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr recorded the rhythm track at EMI Studios on the 7th of July 1969, completing it in 13 takes. John Lennon was absent throughout, recovering from a car crash. Towards the end of that first session, Harrison spent an hour re-recording his acoustic guitar part alone.

  The following day he recorded his lead vocals, and he and McCartney doubled their backing vocals to give a fuller sound. A harmonium and handclaps were added on the 16th of July. On the 6th of August, Harrison overdubbed an electric guitar run through a Leslie speaker. George Martin's orchestral arrangement for four violas, four cellos, double bass, two piccolos, two flutes, two alto flutes, and two clarinets was added on the 15th of August. The master tapes reveal that Harrison also recorded a guitar solo in the bridge that was left out of the final mix.

  The mixing session on the 20th of August 1969 was the last time all four Beatles were together in a recording studio. At that point in the sequencing, "Here Comes the Sun" had been placed as the album's opening song; it was later moved to the first track on side two.

• 5. Harrison and His Bandmates Reconsidered

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  Abbey Road was released on the 26th of September 1969. For years, the working assumption inside and outside the band had been that meaningful songwriting in the Beatles meant Lennon and McCartney. "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something" disrupted that assumption openly.

  In his October 1969 interview with David Wigg, Harrison said the two songs were "maybe a bit more commercial" than his four contributions to the 1968 self-titled double album, but "not much better" as songs. Wigg had suggested that "Here Comes the Sun" was the "more obvious" choice for a single and expressed surprise at Harrison's sudden visibility as a composer.

  Author Alan Clayson noted that Harrison's two Abbey Road compositions received "the most widespread syndication" of all tracks on the album, partly driven by the volume of cover versions. In a 2006 Mojo poll, Danny Eccleston described the song as "perhaps the best song, outside 'Jerusalem', that religion can claim credit for," and added that those surprised by Harrison's immediate success as a solo artist in 1970 "clearly weren't listening to this."

  Writing for Rolling Stone in 2002, Mikal Gilmore placed "Here Comes the Sun" alongside McCartney's "Let It Be" and Lennon's solo "Imagine," calling it Harrison's "graceful anthem of hope amid difficult realities." George Martin later said it was "in some ways one of the best songs ever written."

• 6. Live Performances and the Solo Years

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  Harrison played "Here Comes the Sun" at the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971, with Pete Ham of Badfinger accompanying him. Rolling Stone critic Jon Landau cited the rendition as the best example of Harrison's "capacity for pacing and timing," noting that the low-key performance provided an effective shift in mood after Leon Russell's set and before Bob Dylan's appearance.

  In November 1976, Harrison performed the song on Saturday Night Live as a duet with Paul Simon. That same month, he was displeased when EMI included "Here Comes the Sun" and six other Beatles songs on The Best of George Harrison, a compilation released to compete with his first Warner Bros. album, Thirty Three & 1/3.

  At the 1987 Prince's Trust Concerts in London, Harrison performed the song backed by a band that included Ringo Starr, Jeff Lynne, and Elton John. These were Harrison's first UK shows since 1966, aside from an uncredited role on Delaney and Bonnie's 1969 tour with Clapton. A live recording from Harrison's 1991 Japanese tour with Clapton later appeared on his Live in Japan double album.

  On the 29th of November 2002, a year after Harrison died, Joe Brown performed "Here Comes the Sun" at the Concert for George tribute organised by Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall. Reviewer Helen Wright described the pairing of Brown and the song as "an unlikely but triumphant" combination.

• 7. Covers, Campaigns, and Outer Space

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  Richie Havens' version of "Here Comes the Sun" peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1971, the highest-charting single of his career. Nina Simone recorded it as the title track of her 1971 covers album. Peter Tosh recorded the song in support of Michael Manley's campaign in the 1972 Jamaican general election; biographer John Masouri suggested Tosh may have identified with Harrison's position inside the Beatles.

  Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel took the song to number 10 on the UK Singles Chart in 1976, their last top-40 hit in Britain. The timing coincided with an unusually hot British summer and a wave of nostalgia for the Beatles, as EMI was free to repackage their music without the former band members' consent.

  In 1977, astronomer Carl Sagan tried to have "Here Comes the Sun" included on the Voyager Golden Record, a disc placed on both Voyager spacecraft as a representative sample of human civilisation. Sagan recalled in his book Murmurs of Earth that the Beatles supported the idea, but the copyright position was unclear. EMI's intervention meant the song was not aboard when the probes launched that year.

  In 1979, Harrison released "Here Comes the Moon" as a lyrical follow-up, acknowledging that other songwriters had ten years to write such a song "but nobody else wrote it, so I might as well do it meself." In July 2016, the Harrison estate complained publicly when "Here Comes the Sun" was played as Ivanka Trump's entrance music at the Republican National Convention, calling the use "offensive." The family's response was to tweet that they might have approved "Beware of Darkness" instead.

• 8. A Billion Plays

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  By late September 2019, "Here Comes the Sun" had accumulated more than 350 million plays on Spotify globally, already the most-streamed Beatles song on the platform. "Let It Be" trailed at 26 million UK plays against the song's 53 million in the UK alone. By August 2021 the global tally had crossed 700 million.

  In May 2023 the song passed one billion plays on Spotify, becoming both the most-played Beatles track and the first song from the 1960s to reach that threshold. Writing for Esquire in August 2021, Alan Light linked the song's streaming dominance to the reverence shown toward Harrison's 1970 album All Things Must Pass as evidence that Harrison "has emerged as Gen Z's favorite Beatle." Tom Pinnock of Uncut put it directly: "the most played Beatles song on streaming services, by a country mile, is Here Comes the Sun."

  In May 2023, BMI's published US radio airplay figures already showed the song had been broadcast more than 2 million times as of 1994. The reading in the Cirque du Soleil Love remix, prepared by George Martin and his son Giles, opens with the tabla part from "Within You Without You" and fades into instrumentation from "The Inner Light," threading Harrison's Indian influences into the song's afterlife. British novelist David Mitchell quoted the lyrics in a novella sealed until 2114, on the reasoning that the song will be out of copyright by then.