Something (Beatles song)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beatles song "Something" once had a hole in its second line. At a rehearsal being filmed for a documentary, George Harrison could get as far as the words "Attracts me" and no further. John Lennon offered a stand-in phrase, "like a cauliflower", and Harrison swapped it for "like a pomegranate" so the song could keep moving. That unfinished love song, written by the band's lead guitarist, would appear on the Beatles' 1969 album Abbey Road. Its route there was oddly roundabout. Who was it really written for, and why do the answers keep changing? Why did its own writer keep looking for someone else to sing it? And how did a tune that his bandmates barely noticed turn into one that singers across pop, soul, country and jazz wanted for themselves?

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• 2. Muse and Melody

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  In September 1968, George Harrison sat at a piano in Abbey Road Studios and began working out a melody while Paul McCartney recorded overdubs in the neighbouring room. The Beatles were making their self-titled double album, known as the White Album. Harrison wrote in his autobiography, I, Me, Mine, that the tune came so easily he doubted it was truly his. He worried it might belong to some other song, so he put it aside. The middle eight, by contrast, "took some time to sort out".

  The opening words came from a title. James Taylor, who like Harrison recorded for Apple Records, had a track called "Something in the Way She Moves", and Harrison borrowed the start of that title for his own lyric. He pictured the finished piece sounding like Ray Charles.

  The inspiration, as most people tell it, was Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd. In her 2007 autobiography, Wonderful Today, Boyd recalled that he told her "in a matter-of-fact way" that he had written the song for her. She found it beautiful. Of all the recordings that followed, her favourite was the one Harrison played to her in the kitchen at Kinfauns.

  Harrison himself later pointed elsewhere. His White Album track "Long, Long, Long" had already started a habit of writing love songs aimed at both God and a woman. According to author Joshua Greene, early in 1969 Harrison told friends from the Hare Krishna Movement that "Something" was about the Hindu deity Krishna. In a 1976 Rolling Stone interview, he described his approach this way: "all love is part of a universal love. When you love a woman, it's the God in her that you see."

  By 1996 he went further and denied writing it for Boyd at all. He told a music journalist that everybody had presumed it was about Pattie, and he blamed the promotional film that showed the two of them together. That film has a story of its own.

  The Abbey Road version moves at around 66 beats per minute, in common time from start to finish. A guitar figure opens the track. It works as a kind of chorus, returning ahead of each verse and closing the song. The verses are in C major. The eight-measure middle eight shifts to A major, and the melody comes back to C major for the guitar solo, the third verse and the outro.

  Harrison's biographer Simon Leng hears "harmonic interest... in almost every line". Across the verses the melody steps downward by half-steps from the tonic, and the middle eight mirrors that descent in its new key. Leng also reads the song as reflecting "doubt and striving to attain an uncertain goal".

  Author Ian Inglis hears something more confident. He points to lines such as "attracts me like no other lover" and "all I have to do is think of her", and he sees a clear sense that the love runs both ways. The line "somewhere in her smile, she knows" shows Harrison is just as sure of how Boyd feels.

  The middle eight asks whether his love will grow, and answers "I don't know, I don't know". That could sound like hesitation. Inglis reads it as a wry aside: in his view, the love is already so complete that it may be impossible for it to become any greater.

  Richie Unterberger of AllMusic called the result "an unabashedly straightforward and sentimental love song". He stressed how unusual that was at a time when most Beatles songs dealt with non-romantic topics, or hid their meaning in cryptic, allusive lyrics even when they were about love.

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• 3. Offered to Others

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  On the 19th of September 1968, Harrison played "Something" for Chris Thomas, who was filling in for George Martin as producer of the White Album. Thomas was in the middle of working out a harpsichord part for Harrison's song "Piggies". He liked the new tune, but Harrison kept his attention on "Piggies". Harrison said he meant to offer "Something" to Jackie Lomax, whose debut album he was producing for Apple Records. The song never appeared on that album, much of which was recorded in Los Angeles after the White Album was finished.

  When the Beatles began the Get Back film project in January 1969, Harrison brought "Something" along with many other recent songs. The project was later released as Let It Be. Leng calls this a prolific stretch for Harrison and compares it with Lennon's creative peak over 1963-64. Yet Lennon and McCartney showed little interest, amid the tense and uncooperative mood in the band. Martin was unmoved too. According to music journalist Mikal Gilmore, he first judged the song "too weak and derivative".

  The Beatles tried it at Apple Studio on the 28th of January, with director Michael Lindsay-Hogg filming for the planned documentary. Tapes catch Harrison talking through his unfinished lyrics with Lennon and McCartney. Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt, who studied the tapes, count only two run-throughs that day. It was the sole time the group took the song on during the project.

  Soon afterwards, Harrison discussed a solo album of unused songs with Lennon and Yoko Ono. He had stockpiled enough material "for the next ten years", since he usually got only two tracks on each Beatles album. He also wanted to "preserve this, the Beatle bit, more". Lennon backed the idea, because he wanted his and Ono's own projects outside the band to continue without endangering it.

  On the 25th of February 1969, Harrison's 26th birthday, he went into Abbey Road Studios and taped solo demos of "Something", "Old Brown Shoe" and "All Things Must Pass". Lennon and McCartney had recently turned down the last two. Engineer Ken Scott captured a live take with Harrison on electric guitar and vocal. The lyrics were now finished, and Harrison added an extra verse, sung to a counter-melody, over the stretch that would hold his guitar solo on the Beatles' later recording. The demo stayed unreleased until Beatles Anthology 3 in 1996.

  In March 1969, Harrison handed the song to Joe Cocker, judging that Cocker was likelier than Lomax to turn it into a hit. Scott rejects the idea that such handovers show a lack of confidence. "I think he was totally confident about the songs," he said. In Scott's view, the only insecurity was over how many songs Harrison could get onto each album if the Beatles carried on, with the backlog mounting.

  Cocker recorded a demo at Apple with Harrison's help. Musicologist Walter Everett suggests that this same recording appeared on the album Joe Cocker! in November 1969. Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn instead writes that Cocker remade the track afterward. Either way, the Beatles' own proper attempt was only weeks away.

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• 4. Studio Layers

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  On the 16th of April 1969, the Beatles recorded "Something" for the first time, and Harrison soon decided to start over. The Abbey Road sessions had a discipline and cooperation that were largely missing during the White Album and Let It Be. Harrison had briefly left the group in January 1969, partly because of McCartney's criticism of his musicianship. He came back more assertive about his place, especially while working on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun". Martin, like Lennon and McCartney, had also come to appreciate him as a songwriter. Martin later said he first recognised Harrison's talent with "Here Comes the Sun". But when Harrison brought in "Something", Martin said, "it was something else", a tremendous work and so simple.

  A new basic track was finished at Abbey Road on the 2nd of May. Harrison played rhythm guitar through a Leslie speaker, Lennon played piano, McCartney played bass and Ringo Starr played drums. Billy Preston, a guest, added Hammond organ. On the 5th of May, at Olympic Sound Studios, McCartney re-recorded his bass part and Harrison added lead guitar. Engineer Geoff Emerick recalled that Harrison asked McCartney to simplify his playing and McCartney refused. By then the track ran to eight minutes, because of a long, jam-like coda led by Lennon's piano.

  After a break, the band returned on the 11th of July, when Harrison laid down a vocal that proved temporary. The reduction mix that followed removed much of the coda and nearly all of Lennon's playing in the main body of the song. His piano survives only in the middle eight, in the descending run after each pair of "I don't know" lines. On the 16th of July, Harrison recorded his final vocal. McCartney overdubbed a harmony over the middle eight, and Starr added a second hi-hat part and a cymbal.

  Another reduction mix then removed the rest of the coda. On the 15th of August, Martin's string arrangement was added, performed by session musicians whose names went unrecorded: twelve violins, four violas, four cellos and a string bass. Harrison, working in the adjacent studio at Abbey Road, re-recorded his lead guitar part live.

  Writing in Rolling Stone in 2002, David Fricke heard "two moods in one": the "pillowy yearning of the verses" and the "golden thunder of the bridge", driven by a military flourish from Starr on the high-hat. Leng calls the guitar solo "a performance that is widely regarded as one of the great guitar solos". He notes that Harrison worked in the gamaks of Indian classical music, after studying the sitar over 1965-68. The solo also foreshadows the expressive slide guitar style Harrison would adopt as a solo artist.

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• 5. Single and Film

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  Apple Records released Abbey Road on the 26th of September 1969, with "Something" as the second track, right after Lennon's "Come Together". Lennon thought it was the best song on the album. By his own later recollection, he had already made sure "Old Brown Shoe" became the B-side of the Beatles' single "The Ballad of John and Yoko". Now he pushed Allen Klein to put out "Something" as a single. Paired with "Come Together", it came out on the 6th of October in America as Apple 2654, and on the 31st of October in Britain as Apple R5814.

  It was the first time a Harrison song had been given A-side status on a Beatles single. It was also the only time in the band's career that a UK single carried tracks already on an album. Mark Lewisohn argued in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions that the release was a money-making exercise. In a 1990 letter to Lewisohn, Klein rejected that. He said it was purely a sign of Lennon's regard for the song, meant "to point out George as a writer, and give him courage to go in and do his own LP. Which he did." After the band broke up in April 1970, Harrison's triple album All Things Must Pass followed, building on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and his two Abbey Road contributions.

  The promotional film was shot in late October 1969, not long after Lennon privately announced he was leaving. The four Beatles had grown apart, so the film was assembled from separate clips of each one walking around the grounds of his home with his wife. Neil Aspinall edited the four segments into a single clip. Harrison's segment places him and Boyd in the garden at Kinfauns. Author John Winn describes Harrison as "solemn" and Boyd as "smiling sweetly" in leather and fur coats. Winn also notes that the wives looked attractive in contrast to the unkempt McCartney, who had sunk into depression at the realisation that the band was over.

  Writing in The New York Times after Aspinall's death in 2008, Allan Kozinn observed that the idyllic film avoided showing how the Beatles were barely on speaking terms. In it, no two Beatles are seen together.

  Restored under the supervision of Apple's Jonathan Clyde, the film was included in 2015 on the video compilation 1 and its expanded edition, 1+. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone describes each couple projecting a different vibe: George and Patti in hippie-royalty finery, Paul and Linda on the farm in Scotland with Martha the sheepdog, Ringo and Maureen goofing around on motorbikes, and John and Yoko serene in matching black robes. Each Beatle, he writes, looks as if he has found what he was looking for, "but they're heading for four separate futures".

  Gillian Gaar, reviewing 1+ for Paste, points out that "Something" was the last promotional film the band made during its career. Across the clips from "Love Me Do" onward, she sees the form growing from a straight performance into work that was striving to be more artistic.

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• 6. Reception and Rankings

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  Time magazine called "Something" the best track on Abbey Road. In Rolling Stone, John Mendelsohn praised "a dead catchy guitar line", "perfectly subdued strings" and "an unusually nice melody". He added that Harrison's version and Joe Cocker's would do nicely until Ray Charles got around to it. Ellen Sander of Saturday Review called it "certainly one of the most beautiful songs George Harrison has ever written". At the moment of the "I don't know" line, she wrote, even what is not known can be understood.

  Not everyone agreed. Biographer Nicholas Schaffner noted that some "long-haired music critics" were repelled by the lush, MOR-style orchestration, which showed Harrison following McCartney's populist approach. Nik Cohn of The New York Times, an outspoken critic of Abbey Road, dismissed this song and "Here Comes the Sun" as "mediocrity incarnate". Lon Goddard of Record Mirror, though, called it "another beautiful Harrison composition" in the vein of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". He liked how it leaps through scales in the heavy orchestral arrangement, then drifts down to Harrison's simple guitar style.

  Reviewing the single, Derek Johnson of the NME called it "a real quality hunk of pop" and regretted that Harrison was not featured more often as a singer. "It's a song that grows on you," he wrote. Keef Hartley, guest singles reviewer for Melody Maker, named it probably the best track on the album. He had been waiting for the guitar solo, because Harrison was nearly the only guitarist he knew who could plan a solo so that it did not sound planned.

  The Recording Industry Association of America certified the double A-side single Gold on the 27th of October, although the album's continuing success blunted the single's impact. On Billboard, "Something" stalled at number 3 while sales and airplay were counted separately for each song. After the magazine changed that practice on the 29th of November, the single topped the Hot 100 for one week. It became the Beatles' eighteenth Billboard number 1, passing Elvis Presley's record of seventeen. Record World listed it at number 1 for two weeks with "Something" first and for three more with "Come Together" first. Cash Box ranked the songs separately, with "Something" peaking at number 2 while "Come Together" spent three weeks at number 1.

  As the preferred side, "Something" was number 1 in Canada for five weeks and in Australia for five weeks. It also topped the chart in West Germany for two weeks, and in New Zealand and Singapore. The combined sides reached number 4 in Britain, where a single built from album tracks was highly unusual. Paul Du Noyer, a former Mojo editor, noted that Abbey Road sold so enormously that demand for the single was bound to be dampened.

  In 1973, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" were the two of four Abbey Road tracks chosen for the compilation 1967-1970. In 1976, Capitol made it the opening track of The Best of George Harrison, against Harrison's wishes. It later turned up on the themed compilations Love Songs and The Beatles Ballads. On the 17th of February 1999, it was certified double Platinum. In 2014, Billboard placed the double A-side sixth among the Beatles' 50 biggest hits, just after "Let It Be" and ahead of "Hello, Goodbye".

  Critic Ian MacDonald, in Revolution in the Head, called "Something" "the acme of Harrison's achievement as a writer". He admired its "key-structure of classical grace and panoramic effect", and he named the second verse as its author's finest lines. McCartney and Starr held the song in equally high regard. Starr paired it with "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" as "Two of the finest love songs ever written", and McCartney called it "George's greatest track". Paul Simon called it a "masterpiece". Elton John said it was probably one of the best love songs ever written, "better than 'Yesterday,' much better".

  In July 1970, the song won the Ivor Novello Award for "Best Song Musically and Lyrically" of 1969. The BBC ranked it 64th among the greatest songs ever in 2005, saying it shows more clearly than any other Beatles song that the band had three great songwriters rather than two. The Beatles' official website says it underlined Harrison's ascendance as a major songwriting force.

  The rankings keep coming. In 1999, Broadcast Music Incorporated named it the 17th-most performed song of the twentieth century, with 5 million performances. Mojo put it at number 14 on its 2000 list of the 100 greatest songs, and at number 7 on a 2006 list of the 101 greatest Beatles songs. Rolling Stone ranked it 278th in 2010 and 110th in 2021 on its list of the 500 greatest songs. A 2010 Rolling Stone list of the Beatles' best placed it sixth. Entertainment Weekly's staff put it fifth in 2019.

  Kenneth Womack, in a 2002 article for The Morning News, counted Harrison's solo among his ten great Beatles moments. He called the break even more lyrical than the lyrics themselves. Guitar World made the solo its featured performance in June 2011. Later that year, Rolling Stone highlighted the song as one of two key tracks when it placed Harrison 11th on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists.

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• 7. The Cover Versions

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  By 1972, more than 150 artists had recorded "Something". Biographer Alan Clayson later said it had drawn nearly 200 covers, and only "Yesterday" has been covered more among Beatles compositions. The first was Cocker's, and the song spread into easy listening and instrumental jazz. Schaffner said it was ubiquitous "from the Borscht Belt to the dentist's waiting room".

  Welsh singer Shirley Bassey made the best-known early version, releasing it in 1970 as the title track of her album. Issued as a single, it became her first UK top-ten hit since "I (Who Have Nothing)" in 1963. It peaked at number 4 and stayed on the chart for 22 weeks. It also reached the top twenty in other European countries, and number 6 on Billboard's Easy Listening chart. Bassey said she had not known where the song came from when she recorded it. She later suggested that she and Harrison could become a pairing on the scale of Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach. After reading those comments in 1970, Harrison wrote "When Every Song Is Sung" with her in mind, though she never recorded it.

  Frank Sinatra called "Something" "the greatest love song of the past 50 years", despite having long disapproved of the Beatles. According to Du Noyer, he especially admired how the lyric evokes a girl who is not even present. Sinatra performed it many times in concert. He recorded it for a single in October 1970 and again for his 1980 triple album Trilogy: Past Present Future. In concert he sometimes introduced it as a Lennon-McCartney song, but by 1978 he was crediting Harrison correctly. Harrison later copied Sinatra's small lyric change in the middle eight, singing "You stick around, Jack", in his live shows over 1991-92. In The Beatles Anthology, Harrison explained that he saw Sinatra as part of the generation before his own, and came to appreciate his take on the song only later.

  Lena Horne recorded it in a jazz style for her 1970 album with guitarist Gabor Szabo, Lena & Gabor. An instrumental version by Booker T. & the M.G.'s, from their Abbey Road tribute album McLemore Avenue, reached number 76 on the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1970. The O'Jays and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles covered it, and so did easy-listening stars such as Bert Kaempfert and Liberace. Ray Charles recorded it on his 1971 album Volcanic Action of My Soul, fulfilling a hope Harrison had held. Harrison was disappointed, though. He said Charles sang the bridge well, but did it in "a bit of a corny sort of way".

  Harrison reflected on the easy-listening wave by saying that when even Liberace covered it, "you know that it's one of them that ends up in an elevator". He credited its popularity to the easily mastered, five-note melody. Du Noyer partly disagreed, pointing to advanced vocalists such as Peggy Lee, Sinatra and Bassey.

  Elvis Presley chose to perform very few Beatles songs, and "Something" was one of them. Lewisohn singles out his interpretation among the "dozens of high-profile covers". Presley sang it on his 1973 Aloha from Hawaii TV special, and the recording appeared on the bestselling companion album. A version from his August 1970 Las Vegas season later appeared on the box sets Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential '70s Masters in 1995 and Live in Las Vegas in 2001. In 1974, Johnny Rodriguez took the song to number 6 on Billboard's Hot Country Singles chart and number 85 on the Hot 100. In Canada, it reached number 11 on the RPM country chart.

  In 1972, Harrison told journalist Mike Hennessey that the Robinson and Cocker versions were among his favourites. In later interviews, he named a recording by James Brown as the best, in which Brown declares "I got to believe in something!" over the main riff. Harrison noted that it was a fairly obscure B-side in Brown's catalogue. "I have it on my jukebox at home," he said. "It's absolutely brilliant."

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• 8. Live and Tributes

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  On the 1st of August 1971, Harrison played "Something" at both Concert for Bangladesh shows at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was his first live performance as a solo artist, backed by a large band that included Starr, Preston, Eric Clapton and Leon Russell. The version on the live album and in the 1972 concert film came from the evening show, where he played it as the last song before returning for "Bangla Desh" as an encore.

  Harrison included the song in all of his later, rare full-length concert appearances. For his 1974 North American tour with Ravi Shankar, he had been reluctant to feature any Beatles material. At the urging of Shankar and Preston during rehearsals, he added "Something" to the setlist. To the disappointment of many fans, he altered some lyrics, changing the first line to "If there's something in the way, remove it". He also told journalists at the start of the tour that he would join a group with Lennon "any day" but rejected working again with McCartney, because he preferred Willie Weeks as a bassist. MacDonald suggests this jab referred to McCartney's "too fussily extemporised" bass part on the 1969 recording. Boyd had left Harrison for Clapton earlier in 1974, and Larry Sloman of Rolling Stone described the reworked song as "a moving diary of his love life".

  A version from Harrison's December 1991 tour of Japan with Clapton appears on the double album Live in Japan, released in 1992. It was Harrison's only other tour as a solo artist. Inglis finds "extra poignancy" in it, because the woman for whom the song was written had by then been married to, and divorced from, both men in turn. In his view it is not a new interpretation, but it offers a new perspective, as two close friends use the words and music to reflect on the lives they have led.

  Bruce Springsteen opened his first show after Harrison's death, on the 29th of November 2001, with "Something". He followed it with Harrison's solo hit "My Sweet Lord". In April 2002, Elton John performed the song solo at New York's Carnegie Hall, as part of a one-hour Harrison tribute during the eleventh annual Rainforest Foundation concert.

  In honour of Harrison's fondness for the ukulele, McCartney played a ukulele rendition of "Something" throughout his 2002-03 world tour and put it on his live album Back in the U.S. At the Concert for George, held at London's Royal Albert Hall on the 29th of November 2002, he and Clapton performed a version that began with McCartney alone on ukulele. It then reverted to the familiar rock arrangement, with Clapton taking over as lead singer and backing from Starr, Preston and others. This performance appeared in David Leland's 2003 film Concert for George and on the live album, and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals.

  Bob Dylan also played the song during his November 2002 concerts as a tribute to Harrison. McCartney kept it in his sets, holding on to the Concert for George blend of ukulele and rock backing. A version with that arrangement closes the story on his 2009 album Good Evening New York City.

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