Background and Composition
Like his friend Eric Clapton, George Harrison was inspired by Music from Big Pink, the "monumental" debut album from The Band, the former backing group for Bob Dylan. Released in July 1968, Music from Big Pink was partly responsible for Harrison's return to the guitar, his first instrument, after he spent two years attempting to master the more complex Indian sitar. Harrison duly shared his enthusiasm with the British music press, declaring Big Pink "the new sound to come from America", drummer Levon Helm later recalled, thus helping to establish The Band internationally. In appreciation, Robbie Robertson, The Band's guitarist, extended an invitation to Harrison to stop by in Woodstock, New York, when the opportunity arose.
Late in 1968, after producing sessions in Los Angeles for Apple signing Jackie Lomax's Is This What You Want? album, Harrison spent Thanksgiving and much of December in upstate New York, where he renewed his friendship with a now semi-retired Dylan and took part in a series of informal jam sessions with The Band. According to Helm, they discussed plans for a possible "fireside jam" album with Clapton and an Apple Films "rock western" called Zachariah, but neither project progressed beyond the planning stage. Nevertheless, the period was fruitful, producing the Harrison−Dylan composition "I'd Have You Anytime" and "All Things Must Pass", which Harrison later described as a "Robbie Robertson−Band type of tune".
Lyrically, the song drew inspiration from "All Things Pass", a poem published in Timothy Leary's 1966 book Psychedelic Prayers after the Tao Te Ching. In his autobiography, Harrison refers to the idea for the song originating from "all kinds of mystics and ex-mystics", including Leary. Like "Here Comes the Sun", "So Sad", "Blow Away" and a number of other Harrison compositions, the lyrical and emotional content of "All Things Must Pass" is based around metaphors involving the weather and the cycle of nature:
Sunrise doesn't last all morning
A cloudburst doesn't last all day
...
Sunset doesn't last all evening
A mind can blow those clouds away
...
Musically, the verses are set to a logical climb within the key of E major; the brief choruses form a departure from this, with their inclusion of a B minor chord rather than the more expected major voicing. Harrison biographer Ian Inglis notes that this is an example of the same "modes, cadences and suspensions" found in Band songs such as "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".
According to Simon Leng, author of the first musical biography on George Harrison, the lyrics reflect "life's ephemeral character" and the "transitory" nature of love; for Inglis, the song is "stensibly" about "the end of a love affair". A number of writers note the optimism offered in Harrison's words, since, as Leng puts it, "a new day always dawns." Although "All Things Must Pass" avoids religiosity, theologian Dale Allison observes that its statement on the "all-inclusive" transience of things in the material world explains why so much of its parent album "finds hope and meaning only in God, who does not pass away". The song's main message is offered in its middle eight:
All things must pass
None of life's strings can last
So I must be on my way
And face another day.
Ultimately, the cycle of nature offers "consolation", Leng opines, as further evidenced in the verse-three lines "Now the darkness only stays at night time" and "Daylight is good at arriving at the right time".
Before Harrison recorded the song for the All Things Must Pass album, the lyrics underwent some minor changes after he presented it to the other Beatles, then gathered at Twickenham Film Studios for the so-called Get Back project in January 1969. The second line of verse two was initially written as the more literal "A wind can blow those clouds away", but bootlegs from the sessions reveal John Lennon suggesting the word "mind" to introduce a bit of "psychedelia" into the song. Similarly, the repeated line "it's not always gonna be this grey" was originally "It's not always been this grey" in verses one and two, a change of perspective that Harrison made before Billy Preston came to record the song early the following year.
Read more about this topic: All Things Must Pass (song)
Famous quotes containing the words background and, background and/or composition:
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)