Beatles - The Inner Light

About "The Inner Light"

"The Inner Light" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by George Harrison. It was released on a non-album single in March 1968, as the B-side to "Lady Madonna". The song was the first Harrison composition to be issued on a Beatles single and reflects the band's embrace of Transcendental Meditation, which they were studying in India under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the time of the single's release. After "Love You To" and "Within You Without You", it was the last of Harrison's three songs from the Beatles era that demonstrate an overt Indian classical influence and are styled as Indian pieces. The lyrics are a rendering of chapter 47 from the Taoist Tao Te Ching, which he set to music on the recommendation of Juan Mascaró, a Sanskrit scholar who had translated the passage in his 1958 book Lamps of Fire.

Harrison recorded the instrumental track for "The Inner Light" in Bombay in January 1968, during the sessions for his Wonderwall Music soundtrack album. It is the only Beatles studio recording to be made outside Europe and introduced Indian instruments such as sarod, shehnai and pakhavaj to the band's sound. The musicians on the track include Aashish Khan, Hanuman Jadev and Hariprasad Chaurasia. Aside from Harrison's lead vocal, recorded in London, the Beatles' only contribution came in the form of group backing vocals over the song's final line. In the decade following its release, the song became a comparative rarity among the band's recordings; it has subsequently appeared on compilation albums such as Rarities, Past Masters, Volume Two and Mono Masters. It is the only Beatles song to never appear on any official Beatles album.

"The Inner Light" has received praise from several music critics and musicologists for its melodic qualities and its evocation of the meditation experience. Jeff Lynne and Anoushka Shankar performed the song at the Concert for George tribute in November 2002, a year after Harrison's death. An alternative take of the 1968 instrumental track was released in 2014 on the remastered Wonderwall Music CD. Screenwriter Morgan Gendel named a 1992 episode of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation as an homage to the song. In 2020, Harrison's Material World Foundation announced The Inner Light Challenge, an initiative to raise funds for the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund, Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.