You might think that a band’s most streamed songs on Spotify would also be their biggest hits…but that’s actually not always the case. Take the Beatles, for example. Considering the iconic band had a whopping 20 tunes go all the way to #1 on the charts (and 34 Top 10 hits), it would make sense if the only Beatles song on Spotify to have over a billion streams would be among those chart-toppers. As it turns out, however, the Fab Four’s most streamed song never even made a showing on the Billboard Hot 100.
George Harrison‘s Abbey Road (1969) masterpiece, “Here Comes the Sun,” currently has 1,843,025,190 streams on Spotify, more than any other Beatles song; in second place is “Let It Be” with 957,259,543, while “Come Together” is in third place with 965,933,617. But while “Come Together” and “Let It Be” were both released as singles, from Abbey Road and Let It Be, respectively, “Here Comes the Sun” was not.
Interestingly enough, the band’s fourth and fifth most streamed songs weren’t among their many #1 or Top 10 hits, either, as neither “Blackbird” (694,091,599 streams) nor “In My Life” (626,203,305 streams) were released as singles.
As the numbers prove, a song can become a classic without ever spending any time on the charts. But considering how beloved “Here Comes the Sun” has always been, why wasn’t it released as a single in the first place?
In a 1969 interview which aired on BBC Radio One, journalist David Wigg praised Harrison for writing “two of the most beautiful songs on Abbey Road” (“Here Comes the Sun” and “Something”), which had recently been released.
“We’ve been so used to Lennon/McCartney compositions and of course people have been commenting this week about ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ which are your own compositions. How did this all happen? It’s so unusual for you to contribute so much to an LP,” Wigg said.
Harrison gently corrected Wigg, saying, “Well, not really.”
“I mean, the last album we did had four songs of mine on it,” he explained. “I thought they were alright. So I thought these, ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes The Sun’ was ok…maybe a bit more commercial but as songs not much better than the songs on the last album. But I’ve been writing for a couple of years now. And there’s been lots of songs I’ve written which I haven’t got ’round to recording. So, you know, in my own mind I don’t see what the fuss is, because I’ve heard these songs before and I wrote them, you know quite a while back. And it’s really nice that people like the songs, but…”
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Wigg went on to ask whether Harrison considered himself a “late developer as a songwriter.”
“The only reason I started to write songs was because I thought, well if [John Lennon and Paul McCartney] can write them, I can write them,” Harrison replied.
“You know, ‘cuz really, everybody can write songs if they want to,” he continued. “If they have a desire to and if they have sort of some musical knowledge and background. And then it’s by writing them the same as writing books or writing articles or painting…the more you do it, the better or the more you can understand how to do it. And I used to just write songs. I still do. I just write a song and it just comes out however it wants to. And some of them are catchy songs like ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and some of them aren’t, you know. But to me there’s just songs and I just write them and some will be considered as good by maybe the masses and some won’t. But to me they’re just songs, things that are there that have to be got out.”
Over half a century later, the masses are clearly still listening to “Here Comes the Sun.”
Related: 1968 No. 1 Hit Was the Longest Running Rock Single of the ’60s
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