☀️ How the Quiet Beatle’s No-Show Became the Most-Streamed Beatles Song Ever 🎸 cover art

☀️ How the Quiet Beatle’s No-Show Became the Most-Streamed Beatles Song Ever 🎸

☀️ How the Quiet Beatle’s No-Show Became the Most-Streamed Beatles Song Ever 🎸

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 Spring, 1969. Eric Clapton’s garden in Surrey, England. George Harrison is playing hooky. He’s supposed to be at yet another soul-crushing business meeting at Apple Corps, the Beatles’ increasingly dysfunctional company headquarters, signing contracts and listening to accountants drone on about tax implications and licensing agreements. Instead, he’s wandering around his friend’s garden with an acoustic guitar, soaking up what turns out to be record-breaking April sunshine, and writing a song that will become—decades later—the most popular Beatles recording in history. 🌤️Not “Hey Jude.” Not “Let It Be.” Not “Come Together” or “Yesterday” or any of the Lennon-McCartney juggernauts that dominated the charts and the culture and the band’s reputation. “Here Comes the Sun,” written by the “quiet Beatle,” the junior partner, the guy who was lucky to get two songs per album while John and Paul split the rest. The guy who had to fight for every scrap of recognition, who watched his bandmates dismiss his compositions, who eventually quit the band temporarily because he was so tired of being treated like he didn’t matter. 💔As of 2023, “Here Comes the Sun” became the first Beatles song to surpass one billion streams on Spotify. It’s also the first song from the entire 1960s to hit that milestone. It remains their most-streamed track globally, sitting comfortably ahead of every Lennon-McCartney classic in the catalog. Gen Z, discovering the Beatles fresh without the baggage of boomer nostalgia or classic rock radio programming, consistently chooses George’s song about escaping a business meeting and enjoying some goddamn sunshine. 🎯The reason for all that listening is pretty simple. The song transcends time. It feels as contemporary now as the day it was recorded.And the irony is almost too perfect. The story is about way more than streaming numbers—it’s about the underdog winning in the end, about simplicity outlasting complexity, and about how sometimes the person nobody’s paying attention to is the one who understands what actually matters. ☀️Spring 1969: When Everything Was Falling ApartTo understand why “Here Comes the Sun” resonates so deeply, you need to understand what George Harrison was escaping from when he wrote it. Early 1969 was an absolute disaster for him personally and for the Beatles collectively. This wasn’t just garden-variety rock band drama—this was a slow-motion implosion of the biggest musical act in history. 💥George had temporarily quit the band in January during the miserable Get Back/Let It Be sessions, where tensions were so high that cameras captured the whole ugly mess. He’d been arrested for marijuana possession, adding legal hassles to everything else. He’d just had his tonsils removed, which seems mundane until you realize singing is kind of important when you’re in a band. And through all of this, the Beatles were being forced to play businessmen, attending endless meetings about their company Apple Corps, which was hemorrhaging money and drowning in dysfunction. 😤The Apple Corps meetings were soul-sucking. The Beatles had started Apple as a utopian experiment in artist-run business, and it had become exactly what you’d expect when four musicians try to run a company: chaos. As George described in his autobiography I, Me, Mine, “Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘sign that.’” Imagine being George Harrison—you became a musician to create art and experience beauty, and now you’re stuck in conference rooms with accountants arguing about percentages. 📊One day in April 1969, instead of attending that day’s business meeting, George went to Eric Clapton’s house, Hurtwood Edge in Ewhurst, Surrey. Clapton recalled in Martin Scorsese’s documentary that George just showed up, got out of the car with his guitar, and started playing. “I just watched this thing come to life,” Clapton said. “I felt very proud that it was my garden that was inspiring it.” 🌳The relief George felt at skipping that meeting—at choosing beauty and friendship over obligation and drudgery—became the emotional core of the song. When George sang about a “long, cold, lonely winter,” he wasn’t being metaphorical—that winter genuinely sucked, and the April sun genuinely felt like salvation. ☀️ It poured out of him in Clapton’s garden, this simple, perfect expression of relief. Relief from the cold. Relief from the meetings. Relief from being a Beatle, which had become more burden than blessing. 🎸He finished the lyrics in June while on holiday in Sardinia, probably the first peace he’d had in months. The song that emerged from all this chaos—personal, professional, meteorological—was about the simplest, most universal experience possible: feeling the sun on your face after a long, dark period. No complex metaphors. No ...
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