I’m certainly not the first one to pit the Beatles’ solo careers against each other, and I know I won’t be the last. When people debate the best solo Beatles album, the conversation almost always circles around Ram, Plastic Ono Band, Band On the Run, Imagine, and, of course, All Things Must Pass. Ringo can get an honorable mention if we’re being generous. But George Harrison’s sneaky little eponymous record from 1979 deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as his previous works but rarely is.
Ever the “quiet one,” Harrison distanced himself from the music industry in the wake of his 1974 American tour, which saw him running on fumes (alcohol and cocaine) to get through the gigs (he wouldn’t tour again until 1991). Then came Extra Texture (1975) and Thirty-Three & ⅓ (1976). By 1977, he’d finally given himself a true break from music, setting it aside completely for a year while he immersed himself in Formula 1 and his relationship with Olivia Arias. Olivia, a marketer for A&M Records, had been instrumental in helping him recover from that grueling mid-’70s stretch (they’d marry and have their son, Dhani, in 1978).
More or less, 1977 was Harrison’s gap year—probably the gap year he should’ve taken immediately after the Beatles ended, but didn’t have time for because they were all suing each other into oblivion. Most of that year was spent in Maui with Olivia, far from the industry grind, though his friends at the racetrack kept teasing him about when he’d finally write a song about Formula 1. In an interview promoting the album, Harrison told Rolling Stone: “I was getting embarrassed because I was going to all these motor races, and everybody was talking to me like George, the ex-Beatle, the musician, asking me if I was making a record and whether I was going to write some songs about racing, and yet musical thoughts were just a million miles away from my mind.”
He eventually wrote “Faster,” later dedicated to Ronnie Peterson who died in a crash at the 1978 Italian Grand Prix. The song, with its racecar engine revs and tales of a master of speed, kicked Harrison’s songwriting gates back open. A song dedicated to a childhood passion speaks to the inherent peace and happiness he’d found by 1978; you can hear the weight leaving his shoulders as he sweeps over the chorus (“He’s a master of going faster!”). The rest of the songs that followed were inspired by that love and happiness and peace he’d found; in Olivia, in Dhani, in himself, in his non-musical identity. The album radiates a lightness that Harrison hadn’t captured on an album in years.
Harrison shared producer credits on George Harrison—this time with Russ Titelman, giving himself more room to stretch out his guitar work and refine the album’s arrangements. Steve Winwood was a session frequenter, often providing synth, organ, or harmonium parts, while Eric Clapton lent his hand to the riff on opener “Love Comes to Everyone.” The synth work (minimoogs, polymoogs, all the moogs) transforms Harrison’s sound, adding a wooshing, swooshing effect to each song that simultaneously mimics the Maui ocean and adds a psychedelic haze to the whole LP. For as innovative as he was, Harrison was also romantic about his roots, picking up old demos or creating second acts to earlier songs. He went so far as to listen to All Things Must Pass for some self-referential inspo.
On “Not Guilty,” a song abandoned during the White Album sessions after more than 100 takes, Harrison reworks the idea into something softer and more playful, while “Here Comes the Moon” nods cheekily to his dawning Abbey Road classic with a shadowy, sitar-laced foil. Winwood’s keys chill it out, Harrison sings in airy sighs, and I’m certain the main guitar hook could wake me from a coma. It’s a moment of Harrison elevating his original sounds with new textures, combined with the fact that he overall had much less pressure on himself, able to make a fun tune out of a track that he had constantly run into a wall with ten years prior.
Unlike earlier Harrison albums, there’s no explicit Krishna devotion here; instead, he lets the language of love do the work of spirituality, weaving in the same themes of karma, inner peace, and transcendence without naming them outright. Love, in all its forms, had been the guiding force of this stage of Harrison’s life, and it’s integrated into the music so seamlessly that I don’t even know if he realized he was doing it. That love can be general, like “Love Comes to Everyone,” which is, at times, more mantra than song with its bright chords and lilting guitar. The dreamy and delicate “Dark Sweet Lady” offers a moment of specificity, dedicated to his love for Arias and her impact on his life (“You came and helped me through / When I’d let go / You came from out the blue / Never have known what I’d done without you”). The harp and the mandolin swirl around his acoustic guitar, while his vocals are gentle and euphoric, sighing at the end of each verse. It’s another moment where you can literally hear the heaviness leaving Harrison and how he’s approaching this record with nothing but joy.
Freed from the pressure he often put on himself, Harrison approached the self-titled sessions with a looseness that kept the songs playful rather than ponderous. He leans cartoonish at points, like on the wonky ragtime “Soft-Hearted Hana,” which teems with pub chatter and an infectious slide acoustic riff. Inspired by a Maui shrooms trip, it’s goofy and fun and feels like his “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” scratching my brain in a similar way.
But George Harrison’s pièce de résistance will always and forever be “Blow Away.” You simply can’t be more at peace than this. It’s light and shimmery and catchy in a way that I will always remember the first time I heard it. (Specifically: peak COVID summer, when there was nothing to do but smoke and listen to music all day. A friend—who had become something of my Beatles shaman—put it on, the sun poured through the windows, and I spun around in a circle, almost crying at the sheer amount of peace I felt. I then listened to it on a loop for a week straight, and it’s now both my lucky song and my post-cry song.) Its inherent themes, though simple, are lessons I need to come back to from time to time. In that same ‘79 Rolling Stone interview, Harrison said of “Blow Away”: “While everything else around you changes, the soul within remains the same; you have to constantly remember that and fight for the right to be happy.”
George Harrison is George Harrison choosing happiness. In today’s terms, you could call it his “healing” or “journey” record. It’s soft rock often mislabeled and set aside as adult contemporary. More obviously, it was one of his most cohesive, efficient, and star-preserving works after All Things Must Pass. Had he taken his “gap year” right after the Beatles’ breakup, this album might have arrived earlier, but its timing at the tail end of the ‘70s feels ever fitting: a calm, melodic counterpoint to the decade’s chaos and a preview of the gentler sounds he’d explore in the ‘80s. At just ten tracks, George Harrison avoids the sprawl that bogged down some of its maker’s earlier efforts, offering straightforward, strong songs that radiate lightness and ease. What makes it bittersweet is the simple fact that he sounds happy—newly married, a father, finally at peace—and that joy is so unguarded it almost aches to hear.
