There’s no shortage of love songs in music, undoubtedly the most commonly addressed emotion within the art form, where almost every nuance of its experience is covered somewhere by at least one artist.
However, if you didn’t want to search through the entire history of music, then you would be safe just sticking with The Beatles, for they released hundreds of love songs that have all been remembered as some of the very greatest.
From the minute they announced themselves on the world stage in the early 1960s to when they became psychedelic icons in the latter part of the decade, they were penning tracks that were dedicated to their love interests, with ‘Love Me Do’ evolving into ‘Michelle’, which evolved into the achingly beautiful ‘Here There and Everywhere’.
When the latter track was released in 1966, it stood a fairly strong chance of being remembered as the band’s very best love song of all. That was until 1969, when George Harrison proved his songwriting worth to the rest of the band and delivered one of the very best songs on Abbey Road in the form of ‘Something’.
The bleeding guitar line lives in harmony with Harrison’s delicate voice, as the song muses over intense feelings of admiration and infatuation. It’s simple how Harrison has achieved it, but it seems to distil the human essence of love and lust into its most diluted form, and so has captured the hearts of music fans for decades, with some relatively big names labelling it the definitive love song.
While Elton John has more than enough iconic love songs to his name, he couldn’t help but envy Harrison’s, stating, “‘Something’ is probably one of the best love songs ever, ever, ever written… It’s better than ‘Yesterday’, much better. It’s like the song I’ve been chasing for the last 35 years.” Elton’s high praise was similarly backed up by Frank Sinatra, who too labelled it “the greatest love song ever written” before unsurprisingly belting out his own rendition of the track.
Despite the fact Sinatra credited Lennon and McCartney on stage, before descending into his own version, the fact of the matter is that this song is yet another chapter in the crucially unheard story of Harrison in The Beatles. He was cast aside for so many years as a songwriter, yet proved with ‘Something’, he was arguably the best.
However, like all great Beatles songs, we have obsessed over the true inspiration of it, but the details are relatively sketchy as to who the track is an ode to. While common sense would suggest that Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, was the subject, it’s reported that he was harnessing spirituality over love. A dedicated student of Krishna Consciousness at that time, Harrison supposedly wrote ‘Something’ as a devotion piece to Lord Krishna, with the lyrics even reading “Something in the way he moves”.
This contention over who the source of inspiration was came from the fact that Harrison’s marriage to Boyd dissolved around the time of the song’s release, but the sheer beauty of the song goes to prove that the inspiration is largely irrelevant, because what he achieved with that song was universal. It captured the true essence of adoring songwriting and is rightly hailed as one of the greatest love songs of all time.
