Within You Without You - Remastered 2009

George Harrison wrote this song and was the only Beatle to perform on it. The song is about how the answers are inside us, so we have to look within to find them. We can go to the mountaintop searching to find our truths, but that won't do any good if we're not searching within. It's also a reminder of our mortality and our place in the Universe, summarized in the last line: "Life flows on within you and without you."

An outlier on the Sgt. Pepper album, this song features Indian instruments played by Harrison and members of the Asian Music Circle, a collective in England that helped Harrison learn about Indian music. Harrison took an interest in Indian music when he was exposed to it on set in a restaurant scene from the 1965 Beatles move Help!. He bought a sitar that he played on the 1965 Rubber Soul track "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," and then came under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar. Harrison used a sitar to write the 1966 Beatles song "Love You To," which was influenced by Indian music but also incorporated guitars and Western forms. "Within You Without You" was his first song to fully embrace Indian music and also to explore Eastern religion, which became a lifelong quest. Harrison believed in reincarnation, which helped him accept death in 2001 when he lost his life to cancer.

Harrison wrote this as a 30-minute piece that he trimmed down for the album. Speaking with Timothy White in 1992, he explained how he put the song together: "That was quite a complicated one at the time because it was done in three sections, and then I edited the three sections together. It had a solo instrumental in a 5/4 kind of tempo, which was very unusual. I suppose Dave Brubeck was the only person who ever played out of 4/4 or 3/4. See, this is the thing: In Western music, basically the tempo goes 4/4 or 3/4, and that's it. In Indian music they have 108 rhythm cycles, and they can even play in things like 7½. [Laughs.] It's quite complex, but I did learn this little piece, one of my exercises that I used to practice, that was in a 5/4 timing. So I did the solo in 'Within You Without You' into a 5/4, just to show how clever I was."