How George Harrison Wrote “Here Comes The Sun”
Photo by Getty ImagesGeorge Harrison with his wife, Patti Boyd, 1966.
Put plainly, “Here Comes The Sun” is a song about happier times. George Harrison wrote the tune at the country home of Eric Clapton on a borrowed guitar. Harrison only had time to write it because he decided to play hooky from a day of business and marketing meetings at record label headquarters.
As Harrison writes in his autobiography: “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.'”
Carl Sagan wanted to include the song on a disc he would send into space during the 1977 Voyager mission, which he hoped would provide any alien entity that found it with a “representative sample of human civilization.”
Ultimately, however, copyright issues kept “Here Comes the Sun” from being included.
