While Lennon gave us anger (“Working Class Hero”) and McCartney gave us nostalgia (“Yesterday”), Harrison gave us relief . He reminded us that no matter how dark the boardroom, how cold the argument, how long the winter…
The year was 1969. The Beatles, the greatest creative partnership the world had ever seen, were suffocating. Business meetings had replaced bass jams. Yoko Ono sat on an amp. Paul and John weren’t speaking. The “Get Back” sessions had devolved into apathetic silence. George Harrison, the band’s quiet lead guitarist, had finally had enough. He walked out of a meeting at Apple Corps in early June, looked up at the gray London sky, and drove to his friend Eric Clapton’s house in the country.
It is not a song about weather. It is a song about survival. here comes the sun beatles
The Dawn After the Long Winter: Why “Here Comes the Sun” Remains The Beatles’ Essential Tonic
Because we need it. Desperately.
“I’m not going back,” he told Clapton. “Let’s just go for a walk.”
It is, perhaps, the most radical four minutes in pop history—not because it changed the structure of music, but because it changed the temperature of the soul. In a catalog filled with psychedelic labyrinths (“Strawberry Fields Forever”), raw screams (“Helter Skelter”), and avant-garde experiments (“Revolution 9”), “Here Comes the Sun” stands apart. It is the quiet exhale after a panic attack. It is the first warm breeze after a brutal winter. While Lennon gave us anger (“Working Class Hero”)
“Here Comes the Sun,” George later wrote in his autobiography, I, Me, Mine , “was written in the garden at Eric’s house. The relief of not having to go back to the Apple meeting… It was a lovely day.”