1 Overlooked Gem Song From Every Beatles Album
8. If I Needed Someone - Rubber Soul
It must have been hard at times being the third best songwriter in a band with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. It took the one-two punch of Something and Here Comes The Sun on Abbey Road for George Harrison to really start getting his due but, as we’ll see elsewhere on this list, he had actually been making underrated contributions to Beatles albums for years.
A case in point is the folk rock jangle of If I Needed Someone, which it’s hypnotic groove and warm, rich harmonies. Weirdly, for this track Harrison picked up the Rickenbacker twelve-string guitar to ape the sound of The Byrds, a band who had made that instrument their signature sound after seeing George Harrison use one in A Hard Day’s Night.
In addition, the guitar riff and drum part were both influenced by specific Byrds songs, with those parts and the bright, Byrdsian guitar tone in turn influencing John Lennon when the band came to record his song Nowhere Man.
Beneath the overt nods to Roger McGuinn and company, there’s the more discrete influence of Indian classical music. George’s love of Indian music was no secret. The guitarist popularised the use of sitar on pop records but here the use of drone and mixolydian harmony is a subtler example of that influence.