page_title: The Answer's at the End
section_title: Composition
hierarchical_section_title: The Answer's at the End / Composition
caption_attribution_description: Frank Crisp, Esq.
context_page_description: "The Answer's at the End" is a song by English rock musician George Harrison, released in 1975 on his final album for Apple Records, Extra Texture. Part of the song lyrics came from a wall inscription at Harrison's nineteenth-century home, Friar Park, a legacy of the property's original owner, Sir Frank Crisp. This aphorism, beginning "Scan not a friend with a microscopic glass", had resonated with Harrison since he bought Friar Park in 1970, and it was a quote he often used when discussing his difficult relationship with his former Beatles bandmate Paul McCartney.
  Harrison's adaptation of the verse for "The Answer's at the End" coincided with a period of personal upheaval, following the severe criticism afforded his 1974 North American tour by several influential reviewers. In its plea for tolerance and a musical arrangement that includes orchestral strings, the song recalls Harrison's 1970 hit ballad "Isn't It a Pity". The arrangement also bears the influence of Nina Simone's 1972 cover version of "Isn't It a Pity", specifically in a pair of codas performed by Harrison in the soul style.
context_section_description: The song begins in the key of D, before changing key to F for the choruses. In its musical mood, authors Robert Rodriguez and Elliot Huntley liken the released recording to "Isn't It a Pity", which, like "Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp", was co-produced by Phil Spector and issued on Harrison's 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass. Harrison biographer Simon Leng describes "The Answer's at the End" as a ballad set to a "mellow, reflective soul mood", like much of its parent album, Extra Texture (Read All About It).
  According to the way he renders Crisp's inscription in his 1980 autobiography, I, Me, Mine, Harrison made a minor alteration to the original text's third line ("Life is one long enigma, true, my friend") for his opening verse:
  Scan not a friend with a microscopic glass 
   You know his faults, now let his foibles pass 
   Life is one long enigma, my friend 
   So read on, read on, the answer's at the end.
  In another passage from I, Me, Mine, read out by his son Dhani in the 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Harrison explains that these words helped him reach a better understanding of human relationships and others around him.
  The theme of tolerance is further reflected in the song's chorus, where Harrison urges: "Don't be so hard on the ones that you love / It's the ones that you love, we think so little of ..." The chorus lyrics echo the message of "Isn't It a Pity", in this case, author Ian Inglis writes, providing a "bleak assessment of the human condition".
  The second verse begins with an example of what Harrison biographer Alan Clayson views as the "restricted code" found in the lyrics on much of Extra Texture. Harrison sings, "The speech of flowers excels the flowers of speech / But what's often in your heart is the hardest thing to reach" – the second line of which, Allison writes, "is surely [Harrison] talking about his inability to find God, who for him dwells, above all, inside the human being". Allison suggests that, with the singer describing life as first an "enigma" and then a "mystery", the previous certainties of his faith have disappeared; true to the song title, Allison continues, "Only death will reveal ... whether his religious beliefs have been true or false."
  As a further reference to the sentiment regarding friendship expressed in "Isn't It a Pity", the middle section of "The Answer's at the End" reflects the influence of Nina Simone's 1972 cover of that earlier song. According to his recollection in I, Me, Mine, Harrison added this section, or coda, when recording "The Answer's at the End". In the lines "And isn't it a pity how / We hurt the ones we love the most of all ...", Inglis notes the influence of the 1944 pop standard "You Always Hurt the One You Love".
  In the final half-verse, following a brief instrumental passage, Harrison personalises the second line of Crisp's text to "You know my faults, now let my foibles pass". Rodriguez remarks that the subject of reserving judgement would have resonated with Harrison at this time, given the "shellacking" he had recently received in music publications such as Rolling Stone. On the released recording, the song fades out during a repeat of the "isn't it a pity how ..." coda.
  Among the former Beatle's biographers, interpretations differ over the message of Extra Texture songs such as "The Answer's at the End", with regard to his spirituality. Like Dale Allison, Gary Tillery writes of Extra Texture revealing Harrison's "inner turmoil at having strayed from his faith". Leng views this composition as "a deliberate tempering of tone rather than a change in fundamental beliefs", however, with the song's choruses "attenuat[ing] the search for universal solutions to a simpler, earthbound observation". Joshua Greene similarly writes that Harrison had "regained strength and relaxed his missionary zeal" during 1975. Greene references "The Answer's at the End" while stating that "a modest appeal for tolerance" had now replaced the singer's earlier "exhortations to chant and warnings about rebirth in the material world".
caption: Frank Crisp in 1904. One of the inspirational verses he had carved in stone at Friar Park provided the central theme for Harrison's song.
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