How George Harrison Went From Not Being a Songwriter to Being the First Beatle with a No. 1 Album
Nowadays, no one can deny that George Harrison is one of the best songwriters of his generation. But it wasn't always like that. While Harrison was always a talented musician, it took him a while to get comfortable enough in his writing abilities to actually bring his songs to The Beatles. He was the youngest in the band, not by much, but the Fab Four had met when they were teenagers, and two years could be a big difference at those ages.
In The Beatles: Get Back, they can be seen joking about Harrison being "the baby" of the band, and this put him at a disadvantage when it came to getting his songs included in Beatles albums. His first solo album is the clearest example of that. A lot of the songs included, many of which turned out to be huge hits, were songs that the band had previously rejected. Here's how George Harrison became one of the greatest songwriters in history. George Harrison Wasn't Initially a Songwriter.
In The Beatles Anthology, he opened up about how difficult it was for him to assert himself as a songwriter, and that Paul McCartney and John Lennon had written all of their "bad songs" long before the band had a record contract, so they were already experts by the time they had to record. Moreover, they had each other. Lennon-McCartney wasn't just a songwriting duo, it was a legal partnership they had set up when they were very young. In the Anthology, McCartney admitted that a conversation between him and Lennon took place when they discussed setting up the partnership, and briefly discussed making it Lennon-McCartney-Harrison, but ultimately made the choice to keep it just the two of them.
Source: Val Barone/collider.com
