“Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles

George Harrison wrote and sang "Here Comes the Sun" for Abbey Road, the Beatles' 1969 album, and he wrote it while playing hooky. One April day that year he skipped a meeting at the band's company, Apple Corps, and spent it instead at the country house of his friend Eric Clapton. The song is his sigh of relief: spring finally arriving, and a few hours away from the business mess.

The band recorded it at EMI Studios in London that July and August. Harrison's acoustic guitar leads the way, bright and nimble, and he adds a Moog synthesizer, an instrument he brought into the Beatles' sound after buying an early model in California. His love of Indian classical music shows in the way the tune keeps shifting its time signature. Paul McCartney plays bass and sings harmony, Ringo Starr drums, all three clap along, and George Martin produced, with Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald engineering.

Along with "Something", it finally won Harrison the kind of respect as a songwriter that had been reserved for John Lennon and McCartney. He played it at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 with Pete Ham, and sang it with Paul Simon on Saturday Night Live in 1976. Decades on, it fronted the 50th-anniversary reissue of Abbey Road in 2019, and by 2025 no Beatles track had racked up more Spotify streams.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.