George Harrison's 'Any Road' Is Based on an 'Alice in Wonderland' Quote
George Harrison’s “Any Road” draws from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Jefferson Airplane did the same for “White Rabbit.”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers did the same for “Don’t Come Around Here No More.”
George Harrison‘s “Any Road” is based on a paraphrase of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Specifically, the song was inspired by a conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat. Subsequently, the tune became a hit in the United Kingdom but not the United States.
According to the 2021 book War Time: Temporality and the Decline of Western Military Power, the line “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” from “Any Road” is a paraphrase of Carroll. The line appears to be based on a passage from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, more commonly known as Alice in Wonderland. The passage begins with Alice encountering the Cheshire Cat.
“She was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off,” Carroll wrote. “The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
