“Something” by The Beatles

"Something" is George Harrison's song on Abbey Road, the Beatles' 1969 album, and historians hear it as the moment Harrison rose to stand level with Lennon and McCartney as a songwriter. Harrison wrote words and music alone, and sings lead over a slow, tender sway: his own electric guitar, Lennon on piano, McCartney on bass and backing vocals, Ringo Starr on drums and Billy Preston on Hammond organ. George Martin and Chris Thomas produced, and the solo is Harrison at his most lyrical, a guitar line that sings as sweetly as he does.

It's generally heard as a love song to Pattie Boyd, his first wife, though he later pointed to other inspirations. Because he struggled to get more than two songs onto each Beatles album, he had first offered it to Joe Cocker. Lennon called it the best thing on Abbey Road.

Two weeks after the album came out, it was paired with "Come Together" on a double A-side, the first Harrison song ever to be a Beatles A-side. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 and reached number 4 in Britain. The promo film showed each Beatle with his wife, a quiet sign of how far apart they'd drifted before the April 1970 split. It won an Ivor Novello Award for 1969 and by the late 1970s had been covered by more than 150 artists, behind only "Yesterday" among Beatles songs.

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