"Here Comes the Sun" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their eleventh studio album Abbey Road (1969). It was written and sung by George Harrison, and is one of his best-known compositions. Harrison wrote the song in April 1969 at the country house of his friend Eric Clapton, where Harrison had chosen to play truant for the day to avoid attending a meeting at the Beatles' Apple Corps organisation. The lyrics reflect his relief at the arrival of spring and the temporary respite he was experiencing from the band's business affairs.
The Beatles recorded "Here Comes the Sun" at London's EMI Studios in July and August of 1969. Led by Harrison's acoustic guitar, the track features a Moog synthesiser, which he had introduced to the band's sound after acquiring an early model of the instrument in California. Reflecting the continued influence of Indian classical music on Harrison's writing, the composition includes several time signature changes.
"Here Comes the Sun" has received acclaim from music critics. Combined with his other contribution to Abbey Road, "Something", it gained for Harrison the level of recognition as a songwriter previously reserved for his bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. "Here Comes the Sun" was the track used to promote the 50th anniversary reissue of Abbey Road in 2019. It peaked at number 3 on the US Billboard Hot Rock Songs chart at that time and has since been certified triple platinum for UK sales since 2010. As of 2025, it is the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify globally.
Harrison played the song during many of his relatively rare live performances as a solo artist, including at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 with accompaniment by Pete Ham, and as a duet with Paul Simon during his appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1976. Richie Havens and Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel each had hit singles with "Here Comes the Sun" in the 1970s. Nina Simone, George Benson, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Peter Tosh and Joe Brown are among the many other artists who have covered the song.
Background and inspiration
The early months of 1969 were a difficult period for Harrison: he had quit the Beatles temporarily, he was arrested for marijuana possession, and he had his tonsils removed. Writing in Oz magazine at the end of the year, Barry Miles commented on the "isolated life" of the individual Beatles, with "George strangely upset by his bust, uncertain about his friends but singing Hare Krishna." Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required).
Harrison wrote "Here Comes the Sun" at the house of his friend Eric Clapton, in response to the dark mood surrounding the Beatles. Harrison states in his autobiography, I, Me, Mine:
Recalling the song's creation in Martin Scorsese's 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Clapton said that he himself would never walk around outside playing guitar but "this is what George brought to the situation." Clapton added: "He was just a magical guy and he would show up, get out of the car with his guitar and come in and start playing... I just watched this thing come to life. I felt very proud that it was my garden that was inspiring it."
Clapton's house at the time was Hurtwood Edge, in Ewhurst, Surrey, and he later said the month was possibly April. Data from two meteorological stations in the London area show that April 1969 set a record for sunlight hours for the 1960s. The Greenwich station recorded 189 hours for April, a high that was not beaten until 1984. The Greenwich data also show that February and March were much colder than the norm for the 1960s, which would account for Harrison's reference to a "long, cold, lonely winter".
In his 1969 interview with reporter David Wigg for the BBC Radio 1 series Scene and Heard, subsequently included on the 1976 album The Beatles Tapes, Harrison recalled that, due to the many business meetings, he had not played guitar for a couple of weeks, "And the first thing that came out was that song." He completed the song's lyrics in June, while on holiday in Sardinia.
Composition "Here Comes the Sun" is in the key of A major. The main refrain uses a IV (D chord) to V-of-V (B chord–a secondary dominant) progression (the reverse of that used in "Eight Days a Week" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"). The melody in the verse and refrain follows the pentatonic scale from E up to C (scale steps 5, 6, 1, 2, 3).
One feature is the increasing syncopation in the vocal parts. Another feature is the guitar flat-picking that embellishes the E7 (V7) chord from 2:03 to 2:11, creating tension for resolution on the tonic A chord at "Little darlin' ". The bridge involves a III-VII-IV-I-V7 triple descending 4th (or Tri-Plagal) progression (with an extra V7) as the vocals move from "Sun" (III or C chord) to "sun" (VII or G chord) to "sun" (IV or D chord) to "comes" (I or A chord) and the additional 4th descent to a V7 (E7) chord. In musicologist Walter Everett's view, the lyrics over the bridge ("Sun, sun, sun, here it comes") take "on the quality of a meditator's mantra".
The song features 4/4 (in the verse) and a sequence of 11/8 + 4/4 + 7/8 (which can also be transcribed as 11/8 + 15/8) in the bridge, phrasing interludes that Harrison drew from Indian music influences. In the second verse (0:59–1:13), the Moog synthesiser doubles the solo guitar line and in the third verse the Moog adds a counter melody an octave above. The last four bars (2:54–3:04) juxtapose the guitar break with a repeat of the bridge.
The lyric's affirmation of life through the natural occurrence of the sun was in keeping with a contemporary trend, following examples such as "Good Morning Starshine" and "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" from the popular musical Hair. Former Catholic Herald editor William Oddie wrote that the song conveys an "almost Chestertonian gratitude for the beauty of creation".
Recording Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr recorded the rhythm track at EMI Studios (now known as Abbey Road Studios) in 13 takes on 7 July 1969. John Lennon did not contribute to the song, as he was recovering from a car crash. Towards the end of the session, Harrison spent an hour re-recording his acoustic guitar part. He capoed his guitar on the 7th fret, resulting in the final key of A major, which was then varispeeded less than a semitone higher. He had also used the same technique on his 1965 song "If I Needed Someone", which shares a similar melodic pattern. The following day he taped his lead vocals, and he and McCartney recorded their backing vocals twice to give a fuller sound.
A harmonium and handclaps were added on 16 July. Harrison overdubbed an electric guitar run through a Leslie speaker on 6 August, and the orchestral parts (George Martin's score for four violas, four cellos, double bass, two piccolos, two flutes, two alto flutes and two clarinets) were added on 15 August. He also added further acoustic guitar during the 6 and 11 August sessions. The master tapes reveal that Harrison recorded a guitar solo in the bridge which was not included in the final mix.
"Here Comes the Sun" was completed on 19 August with the addition of a Moog synthesiser part. After Harrison had used the Moog on his recent experimental album, Electronic Sound, the instrument had been installed at EMI Studios in August, with assistance from Mike Vickers of the band Manfred Mann, and became an important addition to the sound of the Beatles' final recording project. In the description of authors Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, writing in their book on the history and legacy of the Moog synthesiser, Harrison uses it throughout "Here Comes the Sun", and the instrument's "increasing brilliance of timbre" on the track serves to convey "the sun's increasing brilliance".
The mixing session on 20 August 1969, when the band oversaw the creation of the master tape for Abbey Road, marked the last time that all four Beatles were together in the recording studio. At this point, "Here Comes the Sun" was sequenced as the album's opening song.
Release Abbey Road was released on 26 September 1969 with "Here Comes the Sun" sequenced as the first track on side two of the LP. Along with "Something", which was issued as a single from the album, the song established Harrison as a composer to match Lennon and McCartney. According to author Alan Clayson, Harrison's two Abbey Road compositions received "the most widespread syndication" of all the tracks on the album, partly through the number of cover versions they attracted.
In his October 1969 interview with Harrison, Wigg suggested that "Here Comes the Sun" was the "more obvious" choice for a single. He also remarked on the attention afforded Harrison's new songs in light of the longstanding dominance of the Lennon–McCartney partnership and expressed surprise at Harrison's ascendancy. Harrison replied that "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something" were "maybe a bit more commercial" than his four compositions on the Beatles' 1968 self-titled double album, but "not much better" as songs.
In Japan, "Here Comes the Sun" was issued on a single in 1970, as the B-side to McCartney's Abbey Road track "Oh! Darling". In 1973, "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something" were included on the double album The Beatles 1967–1970, giving Harrison half the quota of songs representing Abbey Road on the compilation. In 1994, when BMI published its US radio airplay figures, "Here Comes the Sun" was listed as having been played more than 2 million times.
After the Beatles' catalogue became available for download on iTunes, "Here Comes the Sun" charted at number 64 on the UK Singles Chart in November 2010. It returned to the chart in April 2012, peaking at number 58. The song reached number 14 on the US Billboard Hot Rock Songs chart in 2017. Two years later, it re-entered the list and became the Beatles' first top-ten hit on the Hot Rock Songs chart.
As of late September 2019, it was the most streamed Beatles song in the UK, with over 53 million plays, ahead of "Let It Be" on 26 million, and the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify globally, with over 350 million plays. Up to that time, it was also the most downloaded song from Abbey Road. Official Charts Company writer Rob Copsey describes the track as a "staple of any summer playlist". As of August 2021, "Here Comes the Sun" was still the band's most streamed song on Spotify, with more than 700 million plays. In May 2023, it became the Beatles' first song to surpass one billion plays on the platform, and the first song from the 1960s to achieve the milestone.
Critical reception In the context of the late 1960s, according to cultural commentator Steven D. Stark, the song's "promise of a new dawn after a lonely winter caught the wearied sensibility of the counterculture". In her review of Abbey Road for Saturday Review magazine, Ellen Sander said that "Here Comes the Sun" was "an awakening, an exaltation of the dawn" and the start of a run of songs that represented "the [LP's] sun side, suffused with mellowed warmth, woven together with motifs, bridging, reprises, surprises, with all the songs set within one another". Time magazine described it as a "dawn-flecked prelude" to the side-two medley, which the reviewer deemed "a kind of odyssey from innocence to experience", and said that Harrison had "achieve[d] a new confidence in his own musical personality" on Abbey Road. Lon Goddard of Record Mirror described "Here Comes the Sun" as his "pet track", adding: "Nice string picking backs it as the vocals approach Beach Boys or Vanity Fare. Excellent melody creates one of the best atmospheres present on the record." Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required).