Isn't IT A Pity? - Background and Composition

Background and Composition

While no longer the "really tight" social unit they had been throughout the chaos of Beatlemania − or the "four-headed monster", as Mick Jagger famously called them − the individual Beatles were still bonded by genuine friendship during their final, troubled years as a band, even if it was now more of a case of being locked together at a deep psychological level after such a sustained period of heightened experience. Eric Clapton has described this bond as being just like that of a typical family, "with all the difficulties that entails". When the band finally split, in April 1970 − a "terrible surprise" for the outside world, in the words of author Mark Hertsgaard, "like the sudden death of a beloved young uncle" − even the traditionally most disillusioned Beatle, George Harrison, suffered a mild bereavement.

Towards the end of May that year, among the dozens of tracks that would be considered and/or recorded for his All Things Must Pass triple album, Harrison returned to a number of unused songs that he had written during the late '60s. "Isn't It a Pity" was one of these, having most recently been rejected by The Beatles during the January 1969 Get Back sessions that resulted in their final album, Let It Be. According to Abbey Road engineer Geoff Emerick, however, the song had been offered for inclusion on 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, while Mark Lewisohn, the band's acknowledged recording historian, has stated that it was first presented during sessions for the previous year's Revolver. Lewisohn's opinion appears to tally with a bootlegged conversation from the Get Back sessions, where Harrison reveals that John Lennon had vetoed "Isn't It a Pity" three years before, and that he (Harrison) considered offering the song to Frank Sinatra. (Harrison had recently met Sinatra in Los Angeles while working there with Apple signing Jackie Lomax.)

Despite its relative antiquity by 1970, the song's lyrics lent themselves perfectly to the themes of spiritual salvation and friendship that define All Things Must Pass, being consistent with the karmic subject matter of much of the album. Harrison would later say of the track: "'Isn't It a Pity' is about whenever a relationship hits a down point ... It was a chance to realise that if I felt somebody had let me down, then there's a good chance I was letting someone else down." His lyrics therefore take a nonjudgmental tone throughout:

Isn't it a pity, isn't it a shame
How we break each other's hearts, and cause each other pain
How we take each other's love without thinking any more
Forgetting to give back, now isn't it a pity.

Some things take so long, but how do I explain?
Not too many people can see we're all the same
And because of all their tears, their eyes can't hope to see
The beauty that surrounds them − oh, isn't it a pity.

Harrison biographer Ian Inglis has referred to the song's "surprisingly complex" lyrics, which in one sense can be seen as a personal observation on a "failed love affair" yet at the same time serve as a comment on "the universal love for, and among, humankind". This theme had featured in previous Harrison songs such as "Within You, Without You" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and would remain prominent in much of his subsequent compositions. The same parallels regarding the universality of love in Harrison's work has been noted by Dale Allison, author of the first "spiritual biography" on the ex-Beatle; "When George asks, 'Isn't It A Pity?'," Allison writes, "the scope of his question is vast: it embraces almost everything."

The verse-one lines "How we take each other's love without thinking any more / Forgetting to give back ..." have been acknowledged as a precursor to Paul McCartney's parting couplet − "And in the end, the love you take / Is equal to the love you make" − in The Beatles' Abbey Road song "The End".