Here Comes the Sun

Harrison wrote it in Eric Clapton's garden, skipping a business meeting, and you can hear the truancy in every bar — the relief of a man who has stepped out of a room full of accountants into actual daylight. It opens with that unmistakable acoustic figure in D, capoed high so the guitar rings like something struck rather than strummed, then blooms into a Moog synthesizer line that shimmers rather than intrudes, one of the earliest tasteful uses of the instrument in pop. The rhythmic hiccup in the "sun, sun, sun, here it comes" section — bars that shift underfoot — is fiendishly complex and sounds entirely artless, which is the whole trick of the record. Harrison's vocal is unforced and slightly hushed, more exhale than performance, doubled just enough to warm it. The lyric is almost nothing: a long cold lonely winter, ice slowly melting, smiles returning to faces. Its power is that it refuses metaphor's complexity and simply describes weather, letting everyone map their own thaw onto it. Recorded while the band was disintegrating, it stands as the most generous thing on Abbey Road. It is the song for the first genuinely warm morning of the year, for leaving a hospital, for the end of a long depression — the one Beatles track people play when they need permission to feel better.