page_title: Don't Let Me Wait Too Long
section_title: Composition
hierarchical_section_title: Don't Let Me Wait Too Long / Composition
caption_attribution_description: English: Brill Building
context_page_description: "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" is a song by English rock musician George Harrison, released on his 1973 album Living in the Material World. It was scheduled to be issued as a single in September that year, as the follow-up to "Give Me Love", but the release was cancelled. Music critics have traditionally viewed "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" as a highlight of the Material World album, praising its pop qualities and production, with some considering the song worthy of hit status.
  Harrison wrote and recorded "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" during a period marked by his heightened devotion to Hindu spirituality, which coincided with marital problems with his first wife, Pattie Boyd, and the financial complications affecting his Bangladesh aid project. The track is an upbeat love song in the tradition of early 1960s Brill Building songwriters. Its lyrics have invited debate among commentators as to whether Harrison is addressing a lover such as Boyd or, like the majority of his lyrics on Material World, God.
context_section_description: In his book The Words and Music of George Harrison, Ian Inglis writes that "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" incorporates many of the elements of pop composition pioneered during the early 1960s at New York's Brill Building, where songwriters such as Barry Mann, Carole King and Gerry Goffin began their careers. Inglis lists these "stock motifs" as "a repetitive and attractive melody", "a stereotypical choice of language", "the familiar topic of lost, or unrequited, love" and "the conventional form of address from a man to a woman, in the persistent use of 'baby'". These elements appear in the song's chorus, where Harrison sings: "How I love you / Baby, so don't let me wait too long."
  Harrison biographer Simon Leng views "pop-soul music" as "the obvious root" of "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" and cites musical tension as one facet of the pop-soul style that Harrison adopts. This tension is evident in the "implie[d] dissonance" during the verses, Leng adds, when Harrison moves from an F major chord to D-flat major. In reference to a lyric in the verses, Clayson suggests: "Although 'Don't Let Me Wait Too Long' betrayed that George's sublimation of lust [in favour of an ascetic path] was by no means total, its consummation was, nonetheless, 'like it came from above'."
  Inglis writes that the message of "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" is "in the title". The theme of waiting is also central to a track that Harrison wrote in 1967 while in the Beatles, "Blue Jay Way", and a similar sentiment appears in his 1970–71 solo hit "My Sweet Lord", through the line "I really want to see you, Lord, but it takes so long". In the latter lyric, Harrison expresses his impatience to see and know God, and Harrison biographer Geoffrey Giuliano interprets "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" as a further reflection of the singer's spiritual concerns.
  Whereas Huntley, Inglis and Walker consider that Harrison is addressing a lover in "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long", other commentators, like Giuliano, view the lyrics as being consistent with the predominant theme of Living in the Material World – namely, Harrison's spiritual search amid the temptations of the physical world. Of these commentators, Nicholas Schaffner and Bob Woffinden highlight "Sue Me, Sue You Blues" as the album's only song with a non-religious subject matter.
  A Christian theologian, Dale Allison has identified a number of Harrison compositions where he finds it "impossible" to discern whether Harrison is proffering love for a woman or his deity, yet he views "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" as a secular love song. Author Chris Ingham similarly writes that, along with the Material World tracks "Who Can See It" and "That Is All", Harrison's expression of love in this song "seems directed as much to an earthly relationship as to any God".
caption: Entrance to the Brill Building, in New York
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