My Sweet Lord - Recording

Recording

Five months after the Olympic session, with The Beatles having now broken up, "My Sweet Lord" was one of thirty or more tracks Harrison recorded for his All Things Must Pass set. It was a song he had been reluctant to record, however, for fear of committing himself publicly to such an overt religious message. "I was sticking my neck out on the chopping block because now I would have to live up to something," Harrison explained in I Me Mine, "but at the same time I thought 'Nobody's saying it; I wish somebody else was doing it.'"

With Phil Spector co-producing the sessions at Abbey Road Studios, Preston again played on the track, along with Clapton, Ringo Starr, Jim Gordon and the four members of Badfinger. The identity of the remaining musicians has traditionally been open to question, with drummer Alan White once claiming he played on the song, with Carl Radle on bass, Starr on tambourine and John Lennon among the rhythm guitarists. The common view, following research by Simon Leng, is that Harrison and Spector chose from a number of rhythm tracks before selecting the master take, which featured, among others, Klaus Voormann on bass and Gary Wright on a second keyboard; Bruce Spizer suggests that Peter Frampton may have added acoustic guitar after the main session. Harrison's original vocal appears to have been acceptable, according to notes written by Spector in August, but the chorus vocals (all sung by Harrison and credited to "The George O'Hara-Smith Singers"), his harmonised slide guitar parts, and John Barham's orchestral arrangement were overdubbed during the next two months, partly at Trident Studios in central London.

Leng describes the recording as a "painstakingly crafted tableau" of sound, beginning with a bank of "chiming" acoustic guitars and the "flourish" of zither strings that introduces Harrison's slide-guitar motif. At close to the two-minute mark, after the tension-building bridge, a subtle two-semitone shift in key signals the song's release from its extended introduction, the higher register being complemented by Harrison's "increasingly impassioned" vocal and the subsequent "timely reappearance" of his twin slide guitars, before the backing vocals "deftly" switch to the Sanskrit mantra and prayer. Leng also notes the Indian music aspects of the production, in the "swarmandal-like" zithers, representing the sympathetic strings of a sitar, and the slide guitars' evocation of sarangi, dilruba and other string instruments. In an interview for Martin Scorsese's 2011 documentary on George Harrison, Spector recalls that he liked the results so much, he insisted that "My Sweet Lord" be the lead single from the album.

This later, rock version of the song was markedly different from the "Oh Happy Day"-inspired gospel arrangement in musical and structural terms, aligning Harrison's composition with pop music conventions, but also drawing out the similarities of its melody line with that of The Chiffons' 1963 hit "He's So Fine" − due to Harrison being "so focused on the feel of his record", Spizer suggests. Chip Madinger and Mark Easter remark on the "sad" fact that Spector, as "master of all that was 'girl-group' during the early '60s", failed to recognise the similarities.