The Musician Insight

How it all began

After quitting The Beatles temporarily, Harrison found himself in a difficult place. This came about when their musicians’ life became immersed in business (especially with their label Apple), making it almost impossible to be creative.

Harrison, wishing to get away from all the pressure, went over to Eric Clapton’s house, a good friend of his. The singer wrote the song in an afternoon, during a time when winter seemed to go on forever.

A light in the darkness of winter

Musically, Here Comes the Sun has a complex metric, with 4/4 in the verse and a sequence of 11/8 + 4/4 + 7/8. It also has a lot of Indian traditional music inspirations in the bridge’s phrasing. This comes as no surprise, as George Harrison fell in love with traditional Indian music and was a student of the maestro Ravi Shankar (Anoushka Shankar’s late father). The lyrics, also written by Harrison, transpire hope and nonchalance. We have a description of the birth of spring: “I feel the ice slowly melting”.

This return to better days is also portrayed by another description: “The smiles returning to the faces”, creating an atmosphere of warmth and renewal. Throughout the song, we also have the theme of surviving a dark period and finding light again: “Here comes the sun, And I say, it’s all right.”

Here Comes the Sun, is a musical masterpiece, which showed Harrison’s outstanding writing skills and introduced traditional Indian music elements to popular American/English music.

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