All Things Must Pass

For almost a decade, George Harrison had been the quiet one. The third voice. The Beatle whose songs kept getting bumped for Lennon and McCartney compositions because the album only had so much room. He watched song after song get shelved. He kept writing anyway.

Then the Beatles broke up in April 1970, and Harrison walked into the studio with years of bottled-up material and a point to prove to the entire world.

What came out was not a solo debut. It was an eruption. A triple album recorded in London with Phil Spector producing, featuring an army of musicians including Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr, drenched in the Wall of Sound and Harrison's newly discovered slide guitar, a warm, searching tone that sounds like a man finally allowed to speak at full volume. The songs had been sitting in him for years. You can hear it. They pour out with the urgency of things that have waited too long.

"My Sweet Lord" became one of the best-selling singles of 1971. "Wah-Wah" opens with a guitar line so joyful it sounds like relief. The title track sits in the middle of it all like a quiet center of gravity, a meditation on impermanence drawn from the Tao Te Ching that somehow manages to feel both ancient and completely personal.

This is what it sounds like when someone who has been underestimated for a decade finally gets to show everything they had. Put it on and you will understand immediately why it stunned the world.