While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Harrison brought it in as an acoustic sketch derived from an I Ching-style experiment in randomness, and the band was indifferent until he drove Eric Clapton to Abbey Road and put a guitar in his hands. Clapton's solo — played on a Gibson Les Paul, then flanged and wobbled by Chris Thomas at the desk to make it sound less "Cream," more Beatle — is one of rock's great vocal-adjacent performances, bending notes past their obvious resolutions into something wounded. Underneath, McCartney's piano and Harrison's organ hold a slow, funereal descending line in A minor; Ringo plays with unusual weight, letting the toms bloom. Harrison's vocal is the quietest thing in the mix, and that's the point: the lyric is a lament about attention and neglect, about love sleeping while the world turns, written by the member of the band most accustomed to being overlooked. It never accuses anyone directly. The grief stays diffuse, cosmic, addressed to no one and everyone. This is a headphones song for the hour after everyone has gone home — when the specific complaint has burned off and what remains is a general ache at how much goes unattended.