Crying

Written by: Harrison
Recorded: 9–13 January 1968
Producer: George Harrison

Released: 1 November 1968 (UK), 2 December 1968 (US)

Available on:
Wonderwall Music

Personnel

Aashish Khan: sarod
Mahapurush Misra: tabla, pakhavaj
Sharad Kumar, Hanuman Jadev: shehnai
Shambhu Das, Indranil Bhattacharya: sitar
Shankar Ghosh: tabla
Chandrashekhar Naringrekar: surbahar
Shivkumar Sharma: santoor
SR Kenkare: bansuri
Vinayak Vora: tar shehnai
Rijram Desad: harmonium, tabla tarang

‘Crying’ is the 13th track on George Harrison’s debut solo album Wonderwall Music.

The instrumental track was sampled in the outro of ‘Save The World’ on Harrison’s ninth solo album, 1981’s Somewhere In England.

You spotted that? Three points for you! The whole ‘Save The World’ song blows up in the middle, where we all get nuked, with babies crying. That latter song is very serious, but at the same time is hysterical. The lyrics have got a lot of funny things about “dogfood salesmen” and “making your own H-bomb in the kitchen with your mom.” At the end, I just wanted to let the whole song go out with something sad, to touch that nerve and maybe make you think, ‘Ohhh s**t.’ I thought of that instrument I used on Wonderwall Music called the thar-shanhai, which means ‘string’ shanhai. It’s like a one-string fiddle, a bowed instrument with the sympathetic strings resting over a stretched skin, so it has that hollow, echoey resonance, a wailing, crying sound.