Song Of The Week Oct 13-19: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Those who know me personally are probably already familiar with my respect for a little-known foursome out of Liverpool, England known as The Beatles. You'd be hard-pressed to find another music group that wrote so prolifically or accomplished so much in such a short a period of time. In essentially 8 years together, they released 12 studio albums, 18 compilation albums, 13 extended plays, and 25 singles. 11 of their studio albums reached #1 on the charts and 27 of their tracks became #1 hits. To date, they have sold over 500 million records and continue to influence the artists of today.

Given their huge notoriety and the volume of work already dedicated to them, you may wonder why I would bother to write about The Beatles at all. I guess we could ask the same thing about Shakespeare. Only the Bible has been translated into more languages or published in more countries. Also, there are literally truckloads of scholarly work on the man and his plays. Japan alone has published nearly as many scholarly articles on Shakespeare's work as the entire English-speaking world! This is quite a feat, given the fact that he didn't write in a universally accessible medium like music; something within his work was able to survive translation and remain relevant even in cultures that were far-removed from his, like Japan. And yet we continue to quote him, talk about his life, analyze his characters, and stage his plays. Occasionally, an artist or group of artists is able to transcend normal expectations and produce something that is truly remarkable. When that happens, they create a dialogue that never really disappears from the collective consciousness. So it is with The Beatles, our "musical Shakespeares."

With the above justification, I forge ahead with a special threefold Song Of The Week. This week's edition focuses on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" from the 1968 release The Beatles (commonly referred to as The White Album due to its stark white cover). Unlike most Beatles originals, the song was penned by George Harrison and not the usual John Lennon/Paul McCartney duo. When I first started listening to The Beatles when I was in junior high, I was drawn to McCartney's ballads and vocal abilities, but over time, I started to realize that Harrison was the unsung hero of the band(Ringo was just lucky). This week, I've included three versions of the song: the original, an updated demo released on the album Love, and (ahem) a cover that I recorded in the summer of 2007. What I'm trying to show is that the same Beatles track continues to undergo adaptations, just as many of Shakespeare's plays have.

One of the reasons why "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is so cool is that it is a musical intersection of two of the great rock influences: The Beatles and Eric Clapton. The White Album era was a volatile one for The Beatles; Paul was becoming increasingly controlling, John was John, and Ringo even temporarily left the band (a crippling loss, to be sure; do I sound sarcastic?). In the midst of increasing tension amongst band members, George felt a sense of frustration as time after time, his material was pushed aside by the Lennon/McCartney duo. According to Clapton, he and Harrison had struck up a friendship and one day, Harrison took him out for a drive, eventually arriving at Abbey Road Studios in London. He told Clapton that he wanted him to make a guest appearance on a song they were recording. Clapton was shocked and didn't even have a guitar with him at the time; he had to borrow Harrison's in the studio. Clapton's solo is what makes the song for me; he actually made the guitar sound like it was weeping. Apparently, Clapton laid down the lead guitar in one take and that was the recording that would appear on The White Album. That is also the track I've included first on the playlist.



We now fast-forward 38 years. Lennon and Harrison were gone and McCartney and Starr were both working on solo projects. Cirque du Soleil was in production of a show called Love and with McCartney and Starr's approval, had enlisted the help of former Beatles producer George Martin and his son Giles. The father-son team used elements from more than 130 Beatles recordings to remix well-know classics like "Yesterday," "All You Need Is Love" and "Get Back," among many others. Of particular interest for us was a demo version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" that featured Harrison on vocals and acoustic guitar and a harpsichord as backup. The Martins cleaned up the original recording and the nearly-deaf George Martin composed a rich string arrangement to deepen the track. The resulting effect is hauntingly beautiful: we get the tragic verses followed by the major-key chorus plus an extra verse that was apparently discarded when the full band recorded the song in the studio. This version is what inspired my own cover and is also included in the playlist below.

The third iteration included here was actually recorded at a tiny apartment I lived in just after I got married. I was already familiar with the Love version of the song and while I was learning to use some new recording equipment I had recently bought, my wife suggested that I record my own version of the song. I chose a key that would work for me vocally, then sat down and began to record the principal rhythm track on my guitar. I wanted to broaden the sound of the backup guitars, so I used different chords in order to produce notes and combinations that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. By this point, the momentum had picked up and I was thoroughly immersed in the arrangement process. I started to experiment with different lead guitar lines. I wanted to create something that was like a hybrid of the White Album and the Love versions: acoustically driven, but with prominent guitar fills pushing the song forward. I also wanted to preserve that haunting quality of the Love version, so I put a lot of reverb on the tracks to create a very open, resonant sound. Finally, I took a few takes to lay down the lead vocal. I decided to include the previously-discarded last verse from Harrison's demo version. I really like the line about looking "from the wings of the play you are staging" and the lyric seems especially appropriate, given all the Shakespeare allusions I've already made. I finished mixing the track and the result is what I've posted below. I had a lot of fun with it.

This is what made me want to start writing about music in the first place: truly great songs that perpetually maintain their relevance. I could have chosen any one of dozens of Beatles tracks for this edition of SOTW, but I was fortunate enough to have had some personal experience with "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Anyway, I hope you enjoy all three versions of this very cool song. Until next time.