Of all the verdicts passed on George Harrison’s songwriting, the most quoted belongs to critic Ian MacDonald, who called “All Things Must Pass” “the wisest song never recorded by the Beatles.” Never recorded — that is the sting in it. Harrison wrote the song in late 1968, played it to the Beatles on the very first day of the Get Back sessions in January 1969, and watched them rehearse it, tinker with it and quietly set it aside. Two years later it closed the third side of his triple album All Things Must Pass, gave that album its title, and came to be read by the whole world as his serene farewell to the band that had declined to record it.
It is a song about impermanence that has proved remarkably permanent. Its lyric promises that darkness, grey weather and grief are all temporary — and its history demonstrates the point twice over. Rejected in the room where “Get Back” and “Let It Be” were being assembled, it waited out the Beatles’ collapse and emerged, in November 1970, as the title track of the most successful album any former Beatle had yet made.
Written in Woodstock, in the Band’s Shadow
The song’s roots lie not in London but in the Catskill Mountains. In July 1968 the Band — Bob Dylan’s former backing group — released their debut album, Music from Big Pink, and Harrison became one of its loudest British champions, declaring it, in drummer Levon Helm’s recollection, “the new sound to come from America.” The record’s communal spirit — five musicians trading instruments and voices, nobody obviously the star — struck Harrison hard after two years of struggling to master the sitar and a lifetime of standing two paces behind Lennon and McCartney. Robbie Robertson invited him to Woodstock, and in late 1968, after production work in Los Angeles, Harrison spent Thanksgiving and much of December in upstate New York, sitting in on fireside jams with the Band and renewing his friendship with Dylan.
The visit produced his first Dylan collaboration, “I’d Have You Anytime,” and it produced “All Things Must Pass.” Harrison later described it as a “Robbie Robertson–Band type of tune,” and said he always imagined it being sung by Levon Helm. Talking to journalist Timothy White in 1987, he named Robertson’s “The Weight” as his starting point — a song, he felt, that had “a religious and a country feeling to it.” The verses climb patiently within the key of E; the brief chorus swerves through a B minor chord where a major one is expected, a small harmonic shadow passing across the tune.
For the words, Harrison reached for a text far from rock and roll. Timothy Leary’s 1966 book Psychedelic Prayers contained “All Things Pass,” a psychedelic adaptation of the Tao Te Ching, and in his autobiography I, Me, Mine Harrison traced the song’s idea to “all kinds of mystics and ex-mystics,” Leary among them. But where Leary was a showman, Harrison distilled the thought into plain weather: “Sunrise doesn’t last all morning / A cloudburst doesn’t last all day.” Everything in the song moves in cycles — night and daylight, cloud and clear sky — and the consolation is built into the cycle itself, summed up in the line critics quote most: “Daylight is good at arriving at the right time.”
The Song the Beatles Kept Passing By
Harrison came home to England for Christmas 1968 and walked straight back into the old hierarchy. The Beatles began the Get Back project at Twickenham Film Studios on 2 January 1969, and on that first day — pointedly, before Lennon and Yoko Ono had even arrived — Harrison was talking to Starr and McCartney about the Band’s easy camaraderie: “They’re just living, and they happen to be a band as well.” He introduced “All Things Must Pass,” and the band worked on it intermittently over the next four days of filming, hunting for the Band-like feel Harrison wanted; at one point Lennon moved to Lowrey organ, the keyboard beloved of the Band’s Garth Hudson. The group even discussed Harrison performing the song solo in the planned concert film.
They returned to it late in January at Apple Studio, after Harrison’s temporary walkout on 10 January and his conditions for rejoining. Across the sessions, by the count usually given, the Beatles ran through more than 70 takes of the song. It was still passed over — one of a pile of Harrison compositions, including “Isn’t It a Pity,” “Let It Down” and “I Me Mine,” that met a lukewarm reception, particularly from Lennon. Two small fossils of those rehearsals survive in the finished lyric: Lennon suggested changing “A wind can blow those clouds away” to “A mind can blow those clouds away” (a suggestion born, wonderfully, from misreading road manager Mal Evans’s handwriting), and “It’s not always been this grey” softened into “It’s not always gonna be this grey.”
On 25 February 1969, his 26th birthday, Harrison went into Abbey Road alone and demoed the song, alongside “Old Brown Shoe” and “Something,” recording two takes with engineer Ken Scott. That solo performance had to wait until 1996 for release, on the Beatles’ Anthology 3. Meanwhile the song escaped the Beatles altogether. Harrison offered it, with “My Sweet Lord,” to Billy Preston — the keyboard player whose warmth had lit up the Get Back sessions — and Preston cut it as “All Things (Must) Pass” for his Apple album Encouraging Words, released in September 1970. His version leans on his mentor Ray Charles; Harrison’s would become the standard, though AllMusic’s Bruce Eder, for one, judged Preston’s the finer of the two.
Recording the Title Track
By the time Harrison recorded his own version, in London in the last days of May and the first days of June 1970, the song had acquired meanings nobody planned. The Beatles had broken up in April. His mother, Louise, was dying; she died that July, and biographer Elliot Huntley hears her long illness in the recording’s added poignance. What had been a Woodstock hymn to change became, unavoidably, an elegy.
Phil Spector co-produced, and the recording sits at the tasteful end of his Wall of Sound: steady, “unvaryingly” patient piano chords, John Barham’s string arrangement, horns from Jim Price and Bobby Keys, and — drifting over the top like weather from another continent — pedal steel guitar by Nashville session man Pete Drake, who had flown in briefly to play on the sessions. Ringo Starr drummed, Klaus Voormann played bass, and the piano part is credited to Billy Preston, with Bobby Whitlock on harmonium and backing vocals — the album’s credits were assembled in such a happy crowd that the musicians themselves still politely dispute who played what. Spector, characteristically erratic during the sessions, largely left Harrison to run the project; but in August, sent rough mixes, he wrote back about this track: “This particular song is so good that any honest [vocal] performance by you is acceptable as far as I’m concerned.” His only objection, to the opening horns, was overruled — clearer heads prevailed, and the horns stayed.
A Title That Became a Statement
All Things Must Pass the album appeared on 27 November 1970 — three discs, the third given over to jams — with the song closing side three. Nobody in the record business expected the quiet Beatle’s expensive triple album to outsell the concurrent solo releases from Lennon and McCartney, but it did, comfortably: seven weeks at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top LPs chart from 2 January 1971, eight weeks atop the UK chart, and eventual RIAA certification at seven times platinum. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014, and as late as 2011 it remained the most successful album by any former Beatle.
Listeners refused to hear the title as anything but a statement about the band, and the cover egged them on: Barry Feinstein photographed Harrison on the lawn at Friar Park, his new Henley home, seated in Wellington boots among four reclining garden gnomes — universally read as the four Beatles, toppled around their former guitarist. Feinstein owned up to the symbolism in 2001: “[It] was over with The Beatles, right? And that title … Very symbolic.” Harrison always maintained the song was about the weather of existence, not the group. The world, understandably, heard both.
The Wisest Song Never Recorded by the Beatles
The critics sided with the song from the start. Rolling Stone‘s Ben Gerson heard it as “eloquently hopeful and resigned”; AllMusic’s Richie Unterberger praised its autumnal mood, a song for November, “when the trees are getting stripped bare of their leaves” — with the spring, as the lyric promises, held in reserve. Simon Leng calls it “perhaps the greatest solo Beatle composition,” and The Guardian placed it in its 2009 list of “1000 Songs Everyone Must Hear.”
Harrison himself rarely sang it in public. It appeared on his preliminary setlist for the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh but was not performed; he never played it on tour. Near the end of his life he sang it twice for television cameras — an acoustic performance with Ravi Shankar on VH1 in May 1997, and, in late 2000, seated once more on the Friar Park lawn for the press kit of the album’s 30th-anniversary reissue. A stark 1970 demo with just Harrison, Starr and Voormann surfaced on Early Takes: Volume 1 in 2012, and a new stereo remix of the album recording was issued on 27 November 2020, fifty years to the day after the album.
The circle closed at the Concert for George, at the Royal Albert Hall on 29 November 2002, a year after Harrison’s death. Eric Clapton, who organised the tribute, treated “All Things Must Pass” as the key song of the whole event — and the man who sang it was Paul McCartney, backed by Preston, Clapton, Voormann and Starr. Biographer Peter Doggett imagined Harrison’s cynicism at McCartney leading the band through a song the Beatles had refused to take seriously in January 1969. Perhaps. But there is also this: the rejected song had become the one a grieving friend reached for when nothing else would hold the room. All things must pass — bands, grudges, the men themselves. The song, somehow, is still arriving at the right time.