Beatles News
The Beatles have a plethora of hits in their catalog, many of them written by the legendary Lennon-McCartney songwriting team. But their tunesmith talents weren’t limited to the band, as both John Lennon and Paul McCartney played a role in the careers of other artists.
One notable example came when Lennon collaborated with David Bowie on the song “Fame,” nearly five years after The Beatles broke up.
Released in 1975 as the second single from Bowie’s Young Americans album, “Fame” went on to become his first U.S. chart-topper, reaching No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 and topping the Canadian Singles chart.
“Fame” also became one of the year’s most successful singles, landing at No. 7 on Billboard’s 1975 Year-End Hot 100 list. “Fame” is also one of Bowie’s songs to make the prestigious list of “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.”
Lennon and Bowie share co-writing credits on “Fame” with frequent Bowie collaborator and guitarist Carlos Alomar. The song came together during a one-day jam session at Electric Lady Studios in New York City in the winter of 1975.
“David Bowie is in New York, and I seem to be the guy in New York that all the Englishmen say ‘hi’ to… I love it,” Lennon recalled Bowie inviting him to the studio during an interview with the BBC. “I got to know David through Mick Jagger really, although I’d met him once before. And the next thing he says, ‘John, I’m doing ‘Across the Universe,’ do you wanna come on down?’ I said ‘alright, you know, I live here… I’ll pop down’. I played rhythm.”
Source: Melinda Lorge/parade.com
You have probably walked past a gallery wall in a friend’s home or a restaurant and thought it looked effortlessly cool, as if every frame had simply found its rightful spot on the wall over the years. Maybe you have even tried to recreate one yourself, only to end up with a cluster of mismatched prints that felt more chaotic than curated. The truth is, that seemingly casual arrangement is anything but accidental. It is a decorating technique with roots stretching back centuries, and one legendary musician’s dining room proves it still works beautifully in 2026. A centuries-old tradition hiding in plain sight.
Gallery walls feel like a distinctly modern interior trend, the kind of thing that floods social media feeds every spring. But the concept actually dates back to the 1670s, when it served as the official display format for the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France. Artworks were hung from floor to ceiling in tightly packed arrangements, turning entire walls into immersive visual experiences.
So when we admire a well-composed cluster of frames in a contemporary dining room, we are really looking at a tradition that is more than 350 years old. The styles of art and photography on those walls have evolved dramatically over the centuries, yet the underlying principle – gathering meaningful pieces together in a deliberate arrangement – has barely changed at all. Isn’t it remarkable that a display method born in a French academy still feels fresh enough to inspire homeowners today?
Source: graziamagazine.com/Grazia Staff
George Harrison first laid his hands on a sitar on the set of the film Help! That moment kicked off a lifelong love affair with Indian music for Harrison, who helped bring the instrument and its intricate, angular sound to the mainstream in the West after featuring it on the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood.”
Harrison went on to go to India to study with the sitarist Ravi Shankar in 1966. During his time with Shankar, Harrison developed a deeper interest in Indian philosophy. It was around then that Shankar handed him a book that would change his life. That same book also played a major role in popularizing Vedic philosophy for countless seekers around the world.
George Harrison and Autobiography of a Yogi
Shankar later recalled the moment he handed the tome to Harrison. “I gave him his first copy of Autobiography of a Yogi,” Shankar said, “and that was where his interest in Vedic culture and Indian-ness began. To me, he was something like a son.”
Source: Eden Gordon/mentalfloss.com
You know that old adage about a tree falling in the woods not making a sound if there’s no one to hear it? Well, along similar lines, what would happen if a former Beatle released an album that hardly anyone even knew existed?
That might be a slight exaggeration about the exposure level of George Harrison’s 1982 album Gone Troppo. But it was still a shockingly obscure album coming from a member of the greatest band in rock and roll history.
George Harrison went for the brass ring immediately after The Beatles broke up. His 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass set the bar for all solo records from members of the Fab Four to come. Throughout the first half of the 70s, Harrison remained quite active while recording, touring, producing, and staying in the white-hot spotlight.
He soon realized it wasn’t where he wanted to be. His marriage had crumbled, his vocal cords took a beating, and Harrison generally looked and sounded worse for the wear. In the second half of the 70s, he dramatically limited his exposure level from what it had been like in the first half.
The death of John Lennon at the hands of a gunman only strengthened Harrison’s resolve to stay out of the public eye as much as possible. He scored one of his biggest solo hits with his Lennon tribute song “All Those Years Ago” from the 1981 album Somewhere In England. But he didn’t exactly go out of his way to promote the record. The follow-up would receive even less fanfare upon arrival.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Jim Beviglia
No matter how much you might like to, it’s impossible to force someone to care about something as much as you do, and that’s especially true when you’re in a band. This was a lesson Paul McCartney and George Harrison were experiencing in real time during the making of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Both men felt disillusioned and disgruntled, but for opposite reasons.
In a 1990 interview, McCartney threw his ex-bandmate under the bus with accusations of flippant—and sometimes all-around absent—behavior during the recording process for Sgt. Pepper. “During the making of Sgt. Pepper, George hadn’t shown for most of the album, which was unusual, as we normally showed for our recording sessions.” McCartney said that the album didn’t interest Harrison, adding, “I think he was building a swimming pool.”
Videos by American Songwriter
McCartney’s brow furrowed as he mentioned the summertime project he believed was taking up most of Harrison’s time, as if to further emphasize how much less important something like that would be in the face of the next Beatles album. McCartney said that although he made the choice not to say anything, he thought it was a “bit dodgy.” George Harrison Had a Different Perspective From Paul McCartney.
To Paul McCartney, George Harrison was remarkably absent from the recording process of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The guitarist appeared preoccupied with other life experiences, whether building a swimming pool, as McCartney suggested, or marinating in his recent adventures through India, as Harrison might’ve said.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Melanie Davis
BAM in association with Greenlight Bookstore Presents THE THIRD EYE.
To celebrate the debut of THE THIRD EYE: Early Photographs, a new collection of more than 200 photos taken by singer, songwriter, and guitarist George Harrison as he toured the world with the Beatles from 1963 to 1969, join Olivia Harrison, George Harrison's widow and the curator of THE THIRD EYE, for an evening of intimate reminiscences and images that speak volumes. The iconic filmmaker Martin Scorsese joins Olivia for a conversation illustrated with George's photographs, exploring his unique artistic vision and the extraordinary moments they capture.
Source: bam.org
One day during The Beatles’ 1968 visit to Rishikesh in India to study Transcendental Meditation, John Lennon and Paul McCartney attended a lecture about nature. It inspired Lennon and McCartney to each write a song.
The lecture was given by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru in whose ashram they were staying and whose teachings had so influenced George Harrison in particular.
The ashram was positioned on top of a 150-ft high cliff, amid lush riverbank forest in the foothills of the Himalayas, overlooking the sacred River Ganges.
Afterwards, McCartney duly penned Mother Nature’s Son, which appeared on the 1968 album The Beatles, or as it became better known, ‘The White Album’. Lennon, meanwhile, wrote a song called Child Of Nature, and both his and McCartney’s compositions were demoed at Harrison’s house in Esher, Surrey on their return to the UK.
Source: musicradar.com/Neil Crossley
Among Beatles connoisseurs, it’s fair game to claim anything from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road as one’s favorite album. But even within that span of the catalog, a hierarchy of acclaim exists, and that hierarchy has been rearranged over the decades. The ecstatic reception of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band lasted at least a decade. By the turn of the nineteen-eighties, its immediate predecessor Revolver had joined it at the top spot of critical regard; twenty years after that, Abbey Road had displaced Sgt. Pepper. Now, a full 60 years after it first came out, Revolver is the single Beatles album held in the highest esteem — which, naturally, makes it a serious contender for the greatest album ever recorded.
In his new video above, music YouTuber David Hartley explains what makes Revolver so beloved by recounting the history of its production. As in his previous Beatles videos, he draws on the library of studio outtakes that make audible the evolution of each song, as well as on contemporary interviews with the Beatles and their collaborators.
Among his most illuminating sources is engineer Geoff Emerick’s memoir Here, There, and Everywhere — titled, incidentally after one of the songs on this very album, the challenge of whose recording he took on at just twenty years old. In the event, his youth proved an asset, granting him as it did the willingness not just to execute the Beatles’ “far-out” sonic ideas, but also to violate EMI Studios’ policies against experimental use of its hardware in the process.
Indeed, if it was possible in 1966, it seems to have been tried in the making of Revolver. As Hartley reveals, “I’m Only Sleeping” once featured a vibraphone, “Yellow Submarine” once began with a spoken-word intro, and “And Your Bird Can Sing” once kept getting interrupted by uncontrollable and quite possibly substance-induced laughter. Neither these nor any of the album’s other now-familiar, much-scrutinized songs took straight paths to their final forms. Into a runtime of only 35 minutes, the Beatles managed to put everything from “a children’s singalong song” to “a song complaining about all the money they were paying in taxes” to “a song about loneliness” to “a song about laziness” — while also transmitting the “great feeling of joy” for which their oeuvre is known.
Source: openculture.com/Colin Marshall
Hindsight makes it seem like The Beatles were a nonstop success in their early days. But it took them a while to make the leap across the pond. Though they had mounting success back home in England, record labels and record shops struggled to settle into the idea of The Fab Four. That is, until one song completely turned their heads. Learn more about the song that made America fall in love with The Beatles below.
Prior to The Beatles’ now-famous entrance into the American rock scene, they were a fledgling English band with a couple of top-selling songs. Both “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You” did well in their home market. But not even a favor called in from George Martin could get those songs on shelves in America.
“I would send them to my friends in America at Capitol Records, and say ‘This group is fantastic, you’ve got to issue them and sell them in the States,’” Martin once said in the notes of The Anthology Collection. “Each time the head of Capitol Records would turn it down and deny it, and say ‘Sorry, we know our market better than you do. We don’t think they’re any good.”’
This put a blockade on the band’s upward trajectory. They may have been greeted with deafening screams in England, but America was untouchable. The band didn’t want to go overseas to a middling reaction. According to Paul McCartney, they wanted to wait until they had traction to avoid the fate of many other English bands before them.
Source: americansongwriter.com//Alex Hopper
By the time the Beatles broke up in late 1969, they had recorded and released more than 200 songs — most of them originals — and left dozens more in the vault. While the bulk of those unissued tracks ranged from rough demos to jams, several were completed recordings that they rejected for one reason or another.
Among them was the first song written for drummer Ringo Starr: “If You’ve Got Trouble.” Composed by John Lennon for inclusion on 1965’s Help!, the tune was a heavy riff-rocker built on a modified three-chord blues progression.
From the start of the Beatles’ recording career, Starr was given a vocal spot on each of their albums (except for 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night) in order to please his fan base. Because he wasn’t a songwriter in the group’s early years, he sang either covers — “Boys,” on 1963’s Please Please Me, and “Honey Don’t” on 1964’s Beatles for Sale — or Lennon and McCartney cast-offs like “I Wanna Be Your Man,” from 1963’s With the Beatles.
“If You’ve Got Trouble” falls into the second category. According to Ray Coleman, the former editor-in-chief of Melody Maker, Lennon knew it was not his finest work.
“I wrote it. It's the funniest thing I've ever done,” Lennon told Coleman, who attended the recording session for the track on February 18, 1965, and wrote about it for the magazine's February 27 issue,. “Listen to the words,” Lennon said, laughing. “I didn't expect anybody to want to record it.”
Despite Lennon’s disregard for the tune, the Beatles put a fair amount of effort into the recording. The basic track — drums, bass guitar and rhythm guitar, played by George Harrison on one of his Gretsch electrics, according to producer George Martin’s notes — is energetic and polished. As Coleman reported, McCartney was happy with the vibe the group was creating.
Source: guitarplayer.com/Christopher Scapelliti
