George Harrison wasn’t a natural songwriter like John Lennon or Paul McCartney. For the duo, it was a practice they had been perfecting since they were teenagers, and by the time The Beatles had accrued worldwide attention, writing a chart-topping pop song was as easy to them as making a ham sandwich.

For Harrison, it was initially a gaping flaw in his artistic game. His first attempt at writing for the Fab Four was ‘Don’t Bother Me’, which appeared on their second album, With The Beatles. The song was born out of boredom while holed up in a Bournemouth hotel room while fighting illness on tour and pivotally marked the start of his songwriting journey.

While ‘Don’t Bother Me‘ isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch, but it gave Harrison a taste for songwriting, which he continued to develop as the years passed. McCartney and Lennon considered turning their songwriting partnership into a trio at one stage but ultimately chose against doing so. Nevertheless, despite his peripheral place in the hierarchy, Harrison continued to write.

Towards the end of The Beatles’ reign, Harrison had become a reliable songwriter who regularly outshone his bandmates. Lennon may not have immediately recognised Harrison’s knack in this field, but after creating one song, the guitarist finally earned the respect of his colleague.

Before evolving his skills with the pen, Harrison, like Ringo Starr, was often gifted songs by Lennon and McCartney to sing out of pity by Lennon, which he didn’t greatly enjoy. In an ideal world, he’d be performing tracks he’d harnessed from his own mind rather than cast-offs that his friends had deemed donatable.

The turning point occurred on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Harrison only wrote one song, ‘Within You Without You,’ for the record, but it was a stark upturn in quality, and he proved to Lennon that he was now a serious songwriter. In 1980, shortly before his death, Lennon said of the track during an interview with David Sheff: “One of George’s best songs. One of my favourites of his, too. He’s clear on that song. His mind and his music are clear. There is his innate talent; he brought that sound together.”

It was a song influenced by Harrison’s period spent in India, which changed his attitude towards music, thanks to his blossoming friendship with Ravi Shankar. “‘Within You Without You’ came about after I had spent a bit of time in India and fallen under the spell of the country and its music,” he once explained. “I had brought back a lot of instruments. It was written at Klaus Voormann’s house in Hampstead after dinner one night. The song came to me when I was playing a pedal harmonium.”

Harrison continued: “I’d also spent a lot of time with Ravi Shankar, trying to figure out how to sit and hold the sitar, and how to play it. ‘Within You Without You’ was a song that I wrote based upon a piece of music of Ravi’s that he’d recorded for All-India Radio.”

‘Within You Without You’ is the moment that Harrison discovered his own sound, adding an otherworldly new dimension to The Beatles. Rather than attempting to write in the vein of Lennon or McCartney, ‘Within You Without You’ is a song that Harrison could have only written and fuelled by his personal life experience. It came from his life-changing trip to India, which shaped him spiritually and musically, including helping him prove to Lennon that he was more than a world-class guitarist but also a songwriter of the highest calibre.