The 10 Best Covers of 'Something' by George Harrison
Most music fans agree: George Harrison was under-appreciated as a songwriter during his time with the Beatles. Between 1962 and 1970, the Fab Four released a little over 200 songs, only a small fraction of which were penned by Harrison.
It would not be until the latter portion of the band's tenure and into the early years of Harrison's solo career that his talent earned more recognition — 1970's All Things Must Pass, for example, was one of the best-selling albums of the '70s and is consistently cited today as a landmark singer-songwriter release. Or you can look at it this way: two of the most-streamed Beatles songs ever were written by Harrison, "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something."
Appearing on 1969's Abbey Road, "Something" was Harrison's very first A-side Beatles single — seven years after the band began releasing music. It was a No. 1 hit in the U.S., as well as No. 4 in the U.K., and almost immediately, fellow musicians recognized its strength and starting covering the song both live and on their own records.
"I realize that the sign of a good song is when it has lots of cover versions," Harrison would say in The Beatles Anthology. We agree. Below, in no particular order, are the 10 Best Covers of 'Something' by George Harrison.
Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra did "Something" his way. He started performing the song live at his concerts not long after the song was released, and also included it on his 1972 album Frank Sinatra's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. "It's one of the best love songs I believe to be written in 50 or 100 years," Sinatra said just before performing the show at the Concert for Americas in the Dominican Republic in 1982, "and it never says 'I love you' in the song, but it really is one of the finest." The singer was in his mid 60s then — compared to Harrison, who was 26 when he laid down the original demos of the song — lending it a sort of wisened tone.
Source: Allison Rapp/ultimateclassicrock.com
