"Something" is a single released by The Beatles in 1969, and featured on the album Abbey Road. "Something" was the first song written by George Harrison to appear on the A-side of a Beatles single. It was one of the first Beatles singles to contain tracks already available on a long playing (LP) album, with both "Something" and "Come Together" having appeared on Abbey Road. "Something" was the only Harrison composition to top the American charts while he was a Beatle.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney—the two principal songwriting members of the band—both praised "Something" as among the best songs Harrison had written. As well as critical acclaim, the single achieved commercial success, topping the Billboard charts in the United States, and entering the top 10 in the United Kingdom. The song's success continued after the breakup of The Beatles, when it was covered by over 150 artists including Elvis Presley, Shirley Bassey, Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Julio Iglesias, Smokey Robinson, Joe Cocker becoming the second-most covered Beatles song after "Yesterday".Time Robert Sullivan, His Magical, Mystical Tour, 10 December 2001. retrieved 2 October 2008.

Writing

During the 1968 recording sessions for The Beatles (also referred to as the White Album), Harrison began working on a song that eventually became known as "Something." Initially based on the James Taylor song "Something in the Way She Moves", the song's first lyrics ("Something in the way she moves/Attracts me like no other lover") were used as filler while the melody was being developed.

Harrison later said that "I had a break while Paul was doing some overdubbing so I went into an empty studio and began to write. That's really all there is to it, except the middle took some time to sort out. It didn't go on the White Album because we'd already finished all the tracks.""Album: Abbey Road". Retrieved 30 March 2006. A demo recording of the song by Harrison from this period appears on the Beatles Anthology 3 collection, released in 1996.

Many believe that Harrison's inspiration for "Something" was his wife at the time, Pattie Boyd. Boyd confirmed that inspiration in her 2007 autobiography, Wonderful Tonight, where she wrote: "He told me, in a matter-of-fact way, that he had written it for me."

Harrison had cited other sources of inspiration. In a 1996 interview he responded to the question of whether the song was about Pattie: "Well no, I didn't it about her. I just wrote it, and then somebody put together a video. And what they did was they went out and got some footage of me and Pattie, Paul and Linda, Ringo and Maureen, it was at that time, and John and Yoko and they just made up a little video to go with it. So then, everybody presumed I wrote it about Pattie, but actually, when I wrote it, I was thinking of Ray Charles."