page_title: While My Guitar Gently Weeps
section_title: Release and reception
hierarchical_section_title: While My Guitar Gently Weeps / Release and reception
caption_attribution_description: Cover of The Beatles' eponymous album, also known as The White Album.
context_page_description: "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1968 double album The Beatles. It was written by George Harrison, the band's lead guitarist. The song serves as a comment on the disharmony within the Beatles following their return from studying Transcendental Meditation in India in early 1968. This lack of camaraderie was reflected in the band's initial apathy towards the composition, which Harrison countered by inviting his friend and occasional collaborator, Eric Clapton, to contribute to the recording. Clapton overdubbed a lead guitar part, although he was not formally credited for his contribution.
  Harrison wrote "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" as an exercise in randomness inspired by the Chinese I Ching. The song conveys his dismay at the world's unrealised potential for universal love, which he refers to as "the love there that's sleeping". Harrison first recorded it with a sparse backing of acoustic guitar and harmonium – a version that appeared on the 1996 Anthology 3 outtakes compilation and, with the addition of a string arrangement by George Martin, on the Love soundtrack album in 2006.
context_section_description: Apple Records released The Beatles on 22 November 1968. One of four Harrison compositions on the double album, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was sequenced as the penultimate track on side one in the LP format, between Lennon's "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" and "Happiness Is a Warm Gun". The song was issued as the B-side of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", a McCartney-written song that had also tested the Beatles' patience during the White Album sessions. This single was an international hit, topping charts in Australia, Austria, Switzerland and West Germany, but was not released in Britain or the United States.
  Recalling the release in his 1977 book The Beatles Forever, Nicholas Schaffner said that, in returning to pop/rock songwriting after his excursions into the Indian classical style, Harrison's four White Album songs "firmly established him as a contender" beside Lennon and McCartney. In Schaffner's description, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was the most instantly popular of "a quartet of more conventionally accessible pop songs [written by Harrison] that many felt were among the finest on the album". According to Beatles historian Erin Torkelson Weber, the release of the White Album marked the start of a period when many observers began to consider his songs "equal to some of Lennon and McCartney's best compositions", a view that was heightened with his two contributions to the Beatles' 1969 album Abbey Road, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun". New Yorker columnist Mark Hertsgaard, writing in his 1995 book A Day in the Life, said "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was "the first great composition of George's career and perhaps the single most impressive song on the White Album".
  Among contemporary reviews, Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone said that "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was "one of George Harrison's very best songs", and likened it to "Blue Jay Way" in that it "recalls California, the simple Baja California beat, the dreamy words of the Los Angeles haze, the organic pace lapping around every room as if in invisible waves". Wenner found the lyrics "slightly self-righteous and preaching", representing "a general set of incidents, a message, like a sermon, impersonally directed to everyone", and concluded: "I am willing to bet something substantial that the lead guitarist on this cut is Eric Clapton, yet another involution of the circular logic on which this song [is] so superbly constructed as a musical piece." In his review for the International Times, Barry Miles said the song was a "great tune" with "nice hi-hats" but a "lifeless" guitar part. Alan Smith of the NME credited the "warm voice" and "very strong melody" to McCartney and said that the track was one of the "highlights ... moving into a slightly Hendrix thing" and was bound to be "Another hit for somebody". Three weeks later, Smith acknowledged that the singer and composer was in fact Harrison, and added: "the words are evocative and the melody line is creeping into my mind to stay." Geoffrey Cannon wrote in The Guardian: "George Harrison has seen the truth, and is anxious that we should see our truth. He's a preacher, man of fire. When his songs speak of 'you', the address is direct. He achieves his character in 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps', which, with Phil Ochs's 'Tape from California', is the first track I know that succeeds in making magnanimous love serious and touching."
caption: LP cover of The Beatles. Some music critics have recognised "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" as a highlight of the Beatles' 1968 double album.
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