On the tapes of those sessions he can be heard asking, “What could it be, Paul? ‘Something in the way she moves,’ something like that, ‘Attracts me like…’ I couldn’t think of what attracted me at all!” At this point, John interjects: “Just say whatever comes into your head each time, ‘Attracts me like a cauliflower,’ until you get the word.” Taking John literally, George suggested, “attracts me like a pomegranate.” During a session at their own Apple Studios in January 1969, George casually asked his bandmates for help with the words. Though George wrote much of the song very quickly, he put it on ice for a few months while mulling over how to finish the lyrics. So, completely, I let it pass… If George either consciously or unconsciously took a line from one of my songs then I find it very flattering.” “A lot of time and effort went into ‘Something’” “I don’t think he intentionally ripped anything off, and all music is borrowed from other music. “I never thought for a second that George intended to do that,” Taylor later commented. So in the end I just left it as that and just called it ‘Something.’” And so then I thought of trying to change the words, but they were the words that came when I first wrote it. “I could never think of words for it… There was a James Taylor song called ‘Something In The Way She Moves’, which is the first line of that. Inspiration for the song’s opening line may have unwittingly come from James Taylor, who at that time was an unknown artist working on his first album for Apple Records. I said, ‘That’s great! Why don’t we do that one instead?’ and he replied, ‘Do you like it, do you really think it’s good?’”Īround the time of the “Piggies” session, George had been to see Ray Charles in concert, and has said that, in his mind, he heard the legendary R&B singer tackling “Something.” “That’s the feel I imagined, but because I’m not Ray Charles, you know, I’m sort of much more limited in what I can do, then it came out like this.” “While George and I were tinkling away on this harpsichord, he started playing another new song to me, which later turned out to be ‘Something’. Producer Chris Thomas recalls sitting at the harpsichord while working on George’s song “Piggies” at EMI’s studios on Abbey Road. George himself said that he wrote it on the piano during a break while Paul continued with some overdubs in another studio. “Something” had its origins in “The White Album” sessions. ‘Something’ is a wonderful song.” “Do you really think it’s good?” Gradually he kept persevering, and his songs did get better – until eventually, they got extremely good. I know he must have felt really bad about that. I was the guy who used to say: ‘If he’s got a song, we’ll let him have it on the album’ – very condescendingly. George Martin explained the problems George faced: “I think the trouble with George was that he was never treated on the same level as having the same quality of songwriting, by anyone – by John, by Paul or by me.
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