The story of how some songs were created is thrilling. The perfect coming together of inspiration and happenstance, an artist finds themselves at exactly the right place at exactly the right time, going through the exact right thing. Sometimes, it’s a race to grab hold of the song and get it down on tape in whatever magical moment it was born. But sometimes, the story of how a piece was created is boring, normal, and just like hundreds of others. In the case of one track from The Beatles, George Harrison admitted it’s the latter – but stick with us, there’s a story in that too.

For a long time, The Beatles had their songwriting process down to a fine-tuned formula. From the very first days that John Lennon and Paul McCartney met, they fell into a perfect musical partnership. There was an element of them being yin and yang, each bringing their own unique voice and energy to the table that seemed to fit perfectly into the gaps the other lacked. But the true power in their duo was the mid-ground.

A yin-yang only works when it fits, with the two sides stuck in their own rigid shape. Lennon and McCartney seemed to work so effortlessly because they were both mouldable and still moulding. They learnt to write songs together, building up a mutual language of inspirations and reference points that allowed them to completely get one another. When writing their earlier works, it all came down to the two of them and their “eye-to-eye” process, as McCartney called it, where they would sit down together and understand one another in an instant.

That’s what allowed them to be so prolific. They had trust in each other, an understanding between them and, crucially, a huge wealth of musical references, inspirations and history lessons behind them. All four members of the band had been music fanatics for their whole lives, each with an obsession with early rock, skiffle, jazz or whatever it was that they brought to the table. It’s a foolproof formula, and it’s one that hosts of artists throughout history have shared, with The Beatles sitting in a lineage of great songwriters who knew precisely how to combine tradition, inspiration and innovation.

It’s proved perfectly on one 1965 Rubber Soul track, as Harrison said, “‘If I Needed Someone’ is like a million other songs written around a D chord.” He was willing to admit that The Beatles weren’t reinventing the wheel here; they were merely taking a classic sound and playing around with it.

“If you move your finger about, you get various little melodies. That guitar line, or variations on it, is found in many a song, and it amazes me that people still find new permutations of the same notes,” he said. It’s a beautiful statement about Harrison’s admiration for not only songwriters but his own instrument. The way that one chord can open up to countless interpretations and how one sound has been adapted throughout history, each time creating something new and exciting, it’s a wondrous thing.

So even though ‘If I Needed Someone’ was written in the exact same way The Beatles regularly wrote and using the exact same chords that a long lineage of artists has used throughout history, the magic of music is that the result is very different. Even though their process was a well-oiled machine, the beauty of inspiration is that the output will be new no matter what.