Composition
Harrison himself described the song as "a joke relating to Liverpool, Holy City in the North of England. In addition the song was copyrighted to Northern Songs Ltd. which I didn't own."
Northern Songs was a music publishing company formed in 1963 primarily to exploit Lennon–McCartney compositions. The company had subsequently been floated in 1965, but while Lennon and McCartney each owned 15% of the public company's shares, Harrison owned just 0.8%. Harrison was contracted by Northern Songs as a songwriter only, and because Northern Songs retained the copyright of its published songs, this meant "Lennon and McCartney, as major shareholders, would earn more from his songs than him."
Hence the song's "mild dissonance" and "nasally sarcastic" key-changes have been said to complement the "suppressed bitterness" of Harrison's lyric, which features such self-referential lines as: "It doesn't really matter what chords I play/What words I say or time of day it is/As it's only a Northern Song."
As well as reflecting Harrison's dissatisfaction with Northern Songs, and its major shareholder Dick James in particular – "I was starting to get a bit of an idea that ... you'd only written half a song and he would be trying to assign it" – the song also suggests that, at this time, Harrison "had yet to recover his enthusiasm for being a Beatle", having threatened to leave the group six months earlier, following their final live concert at Candlestick Park.
Read more about this topic: Only A Northern Song
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