100 DAYS OF THE BEATLES – TOP 100 SONGS – 96

NUMBER 96: "Within You Without You" (Harrison – January 4, 1967)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band CD – Track 8 (5:04)

YouTube Video
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (sans footnotes/references) –

The basic tracks for "Within You Without You" featured only Harrison and a group of un-credited Indian musicians based in London. Producer George Martin then arranged a string section, and Harrison and assistant Neil Aspinall overdubbed the tambura. According to Prema Music, dilruba player Amrit Gajjar played on the track. Hunter Davies wrote that Harrison "trained himself to write down his song in Indian script so that the Indian musicians can play them." With "Within You Without You", Harrison became the second Beatle to record a song credited to The Beatles but featuring no other members of the group (Paul McCartney had previously done so with "Yesterday").

"Within You Without You" is the second of Harrison's songs to be explicitly influenced by Indian classical music (the first being "Love You To", released on Revolver the previous year). Harrison said "I was continually playing Indian [sitar exercises] called sargam, which are the bases of the different Ragas. That's why around this time I couldn't help writing tunes like this which were based on unusual scales." The song is Harrison's only composition onSgt. Pepper after "Only a Northern Song" was omitted from the album. Harrison wrote "Within You Without You" on a harmonium at the house of long-time Beatles' associate Klaus Voormann ("We were talking about the space between us all, And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion— never glimpse the truth").

Recording began on 15 March 1967 at Abbey Road studio 2 with Indian musicians from the Eastern Music Circle of Finchley, London sitting on a carpet with lights low and incense burning. On 3 April 1967 George Martin's score for eight violins and three celli were added, attempting to imitate the slides and bends of the dilrubas. The recording released on the album was sped up enough to raise the key from C to C#; an instrumental version of the song at the original speed and in the original key appears on the Anthology 2 album.