Here comes the sun
England, 1969.
It was the end of the Beatles and undoubtedly one of the most bitter pills in the history of music. Business pressures were suffocating the band and leaving them artless and breathless. Paper signings, rights decisions, contract pressures, profits sold, commercial commitments, lost time and the wear and tear on a band with a long history were all part of the context.
George, Paul, John and Ringo were exhausted and the memories were already weighing heavy. It was the end of a long winter and the end of an era. A new cycle was starting, spring was beginning, times of change were coming, and that’s where the song came from. “Here Comes the Sun”, because there is no winter that lasts a hundred years and because the sun will always return.
George Harrison wrote “Here Comes the Sun” when he decided to skip a legal meeting at the Apple Corps Organization to escape to the country house of his eternal friend, Eric Clapton, in the meadows of Surrey in England. According to Clapton, part of Harrison’s magic was that he was always looking to have a guitar nearby and on that sunny morning it was no exception. Sitting under a tree, facing the valley and watching the sun, Harrison began to play. It was early spring 1969 in England and George Harrison began to sing the first lines of “here comes the sun”. In awe, Eric Clapton was witnessing the emergence of a rock and roll classic.
“Here Comes The Sun was written at a time when Apple Records was becoming like school, where we had to go and be businessmen. Sign this, sign that. Anyway, it seemed like winter would go on forever in England, and by the time spring comes, you really think you deserve it,” Harrison once declared.
So the song represented George’s relief after a difficult season, it represented the desire to keep walking, to let go of the past and to open a new cycle. The desire to feel that everything will be all right and that all things will pass. The Beatles’ breakup was an open secret and Harrison was already imagining a solo path. A year and a couple of albums later, the band’s split became official.
Musically, “Here Comes The Sun” represents George Harrison’s ongoing experimentation and his continuous search for new sounds, new instruments and different results. The song is influenced by George’s many trips to India and his decades-long friendship with Ravi Shankar, a Bengali classical music master who mastered the art of the sitar and meditation.
Similarly, the song is written in seven and a half beats, an old trick of traditional Indian music that had never been used in the West. Also, the song experiments with a rare analog synthesizer known as the “Moog Synthesizer” and was recorded in seven sessions and 13 tracks that include three guitars, a harmonica and a symphony of strings and winds. It is no lie that the song conveys the true essence of a sunrise.
A curious fact about the song is that it was written in late March and early April 1969. That same year, the Greenwich weather station recorded that January and February were the coldest months of the entire decade and that the arrival of sunny days was much later than usual. Not only was it a metaphor for the long winter George Harrison had experienced in London with the Beatles, statistically it was one of the longest winters in Western Europe, and against the odds, April recorded 189 hours of sunshine, an unprecedented figure that was not surpassed until 1984. Ironically, that spring of 1969 was one of the sunniest in the history of the English island.
Having lived in Ireland for almost a year and spent a six-month winter, I now understand the song differently.
I understand what it is like to go so long without feeling the heat and treasuring the few hours of sunshine. People really look forward to spring with a desire that becomes almost idealized and at times it seems like winter will never end. That is why the arrival of the sun has so much meaning in these green, wet and cold lands; it is the beginning of a new harvest and a new season, it is the beginning of a new return to the sun.
And just as George Harrison felt it was the end of a stage, so I am feeling it now. It’s time to leave Ireland, it’s time to leave winter and it’s time to say goodbye. Maybe that’s why I felt like writing about George Harrison and the story of “Here Comes The Sun”.
References:
Here Comes The Sun, The Beatle Bible
Living in the material world, by Martin Scorsese
Here Comes the Sun, written by George Harrison
