While My Guitar Gently Weeps
by The Beatles
- 116
- BPM
- A minor
- Key
- 8A
- Camelot
- 46
- Danceability
- 3
- Acousticness
George Harrison got the idea for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" while visiting his parents in Warrington, Cheshire, not long after the Beatles came back from studying Transcendental Meditation in India in the spring of 1968. He had been reading the I Ching, the Book of Changes, which struck him as resting on the idea that everything is relative to everything else. He made it an exercise in randomness: he would write a song from the first words he saw when he opened a book. They were "gently weeps".
He kept working on the lyrics afterward. A home demo recorded in Esher includes a verse he later dropped, and an early version with just acoustic guitar and harmonium was released in 1996 on Anthology 3. The full band recorded it in September 1968, and the Beatles' folk-leaning arrangement gave way to a heavy rock one.
The band met the song with apathy at first. Harrison countered by inviting his friend Eric Clapton to play on it. Clapton overdubbed a lead guitar part but was not formally credited. The two went on to write "Badge" together for Clapton's group Cream. Years after Harrison's death, Clapton played the song at the Concert for George in November 2002, backed by a band that included Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps runs at 116 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.07 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 517 ms. It is in A minor, Camelot 8A, which shares its notes with C major and mixes cleanly with D minor and E minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.