Songs by George Harrison is a book of song lyrics and commentary by English musician George Harrison, with illustrations by New Zealand artist Keith West. It was published in February 1988, in a limited run of 2500 copies, by Genesis Publications, and included an EP of rare or previously unreleased Harrison recordings. Intended as a luxury item, each copy was hand-bound and boxed, and available only by direct order through Genesis in England. The book contains the lyrics to 60 Harrison compositions, the themes of which West represents visually with watercolour paintings. Starting in 1985, Harr
Songs by George Harrison is a book of song lyrics and commentary by English musician George Harrison, with illustrations by New Zealand artist Keith West. It was published in February 1988, in a limited run of 2500 copies, by Genesis Publications, and included an EP of rare or previously unreleased Harrison recordings. Intended as a luxury item, each copy was hand-bound and boxed, and available only by direct order through Genesis in England. The book contains the lyrics to 60 Harrison compositions, the themes of which West represents visually with watercolour paintings. Starting in 1985, Harr
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Songs by George Harrison is a book of song lyrics and commentary by English musician George Harrison, with illustrations by New Zealand artist Keith West. It was published in February 1988, in a limited run of 2500 copies, by Genesis Publications, and included an EP of rare or previously unreleased Harrison recordings. Intended as a luxury item, each copy was hand-bound and boxed, and available only by direct order through Genesis in England. The book contains the lyrics to 60 Harrison compositions, the themes of which West represents visually with watercolour paintings. Starting in 1985, Harrison and West worked on the project for two years, during which Harrison returned to music-making with his album Cloud Nine, after focusing on film production for much of the early 1980s. The book includes a foreword by his Cloud Nine co-producer, Jeff Lynne, and a written contribution from Elton John.
The musical disc contains three songs that Warner Bros. Records had rejected in 1980 for inclusion on Harrison's album Somewhere in England, together with a live version of his Beatles track "For You Blue". This last song was recorded during Harrison's controversial 1974 North American tour, when his singing was marred by the effects of laryngitis; it remains the only vocal performance from that tour to have been made available outside of concert bootlegs. While "Lay His Head" was issued as the B-side to his 1987 single "Got My Mind Set on You", the Songs by George Harrison EP remains the sole official release for this live version of "For You Blue" and for the studio tracks "Sat Singing" and "Flying Hour".
Genesis undertook a single print run for the book, after which Songs by George Harrison became a highly priced collector's item. It was followed by a second volume, published in 1992. AllMusic describes the EP as "remarkable" and "classic Harrison".
Background
George Harrison first worked with Genesis Publications on his 1980 autobiography, I Me Mine, for which his friend Derek Taylor served as editor and narrator. Harrison subsequently edited Taylor's memoir, Fifty Years Adrift, which Genesis published in its customary, limited-edition, deluxe format in 1984. That year, Brian Roylance, the owner of Genesis Publications, met a New Zealand-based botanical artist named Keith West, whose work Roylance considered might be suitable for a proposed illustrated book of Harrison's songs.
Since 1982, when he released the little-promoted Gone Troppo album, Harrison had minimised his musical activities in favour of a role as a film producer, with the success of his company HandMade Films. The content of his previous album, Somewhere in England, had been the subject of scrutiny by Warner Bros. Records, the distributor of Harrison's Dark Horse record label; as a result, Harrison was obliged to replace four of the songs intended for that album with more commercial-sounding recordings for its eventual release, in mid 1981. On the musical disc accompanying the Songs by George Harrison book, Harrison decided to include three of the tracks that Warner Bros. had rejected. The fourth of those 1980 recordings, "Tears of the World", would appear on the EP accompanying Harrison and West's 1992 illustrated book, .
Production
Having relocated to north Wales by 1985, West met with Harrison regularly over a period of two years at the latter's Oxfordshire estate, Friar Park. The pair discussed the images required for all of Harrison's songs, in order to ensure empathy between the illustrations and the message behind the lyrics. West worked up pencil sketches, which he would submit to Harrison, before completing the final watercolour illustrations.
Songs by George Harrison contains the lyrics to 60 of Harrison's compositions, for each of which West hand-lettered the words. Harrison provided text commenting on the story behind some of the songs, along with facsimiles of his original lyric sheets. The book was bound inside a black leather cover, and ran to 176 pages, measuring 175 by 250 millimetres.
During the two-year period of production, Harrison resumed a more active musical career, which included working with producer Jeff Lynne on the soundtrack to HandMade Films' Shanghai Surprise in 1986 before recording his first album in five years, Cloud Nine. The book includes a foreword by Lynne, a "middleword" by Elton John, and a "backword" by Harrison. The accompanying EP was offered in either vinyl or CD format, with the disc housed beside the book in a handmade Solander box.
"Sat Singing"
The opening track on the EP, the 1979-copyright "Sat Singing", was recorded at Harrison's Friar Park studio, FPSHOT, in March 1980. Among Harrison biographers, Simon Leng views the song as a "pivotal composition" in the artist's career, while Dale Allison considers it to be "a crucial song for interpreting George's religiosity". The lyrics document an afternoon spent immersed in meditation, during which the singer surrenders the distractions of the physical world for a communion with his deity. The title references the Sanskrit term sat-sang, which means time spent in the company of "the highest truth", such as with one's guru. Leng describes the song as "a companion piece" to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows", in that "Sat Singing" represents the "attainment" of John Lennon's earlier exhortation to "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream".
"Lay His Head"
Like "Sat Singing", "Lay His Head" was recorded during the sessions for Somewhere in England, in April 1980. The title refers to a phrase from the gospels of St Matthew and St Luke that Harrison had taken to quoting when referring to the lack of privacy afforded him and his Beatles bandmates during the 1960s. In his adaptation, the phrase became: "Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but Beatles have nowhere to lay their heads." Leng views the song as a reflection on "what a man loses when he becomes a media entity: a connection with other people that everyone else takes for granted".
