Pop Song 183 'Here comes the Sun' The Beatles 1969

Pop Song 183 'Here comes the Sun' The Beatles 1969

The early months of 1969 were a difficult period for George Harrison: he had quit the Beatles temporarily, he was arrested for marijuana possession, and he had his tonsils removed.[3] Writing in Oz magazine at the end of the year, Barry Miles commented on the "isolated life" of the individual Beatles, with "George strangely upset by his bust, uncertain about his friends but singing Hare Krishna."

Harrison wrote "Here Comes the Sun" at the house of his friend Eric Clapton, in response to the dark mood surrounding the Beatles. Harrison states in his autobiography, I, Me, Mine:

"Here Comes the Sun" was written at the time when Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: 'Sign this' and 'sign that.' Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton's house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric's acoustic guitars and wrote "Here Comes the Sun".

Clapton's house at the time was Hurtwood Edge, in Ewhurst, Surrey,and he later said the month was possibly April. Data from two meteorological stations in the London area show that April 1969 set a record for sunlight hours for the 1960s. The Greenwich station recorded 189 hours for April, a high that was not beaten until 1984. The Greenwich data also show that February and March were much colder than the norm for the 1960s, which would account for Harrison's reference to a "long, cold, lonely winter".

In his 1969 interview with reporter David Wigg for the BBC Radio 1 series Scene and Heard, subsequently included on the 1976 album The Beatles Tapes, Harrison recalled that, due to the many business meetings, he had not played guitar for a couple of weeks, "And the first thing that came out was that song." He completed the song's lyrics in June, while on holiday in Sardinia

Writing for Rolling Stone in 2002, Mikal Gilmore likened the song to the McCartney-written "Let It Be" and Lennon's solo hit "Imagine", as Harrison's "graceful anthem of hope amid difficult realities"