Rising Sun

‘Rising Sun’ is the fifth song on George Harrison’s Brainwashed album.

He had done a lot of work previously, over the last three or four years, writing all these songs, and each one, when he’d come round, he’d bring a new song and they were always really high quality stuff. And one of them was ‘Rising Sun’, and it just knocked me out. Even just him playing on this little tiny ukulele, you could tell it was a really great song. He had all the words and everything.

On ‘Rising Sun’ I used this room which is the big room at my house, and it was actually wonderful. We had two cellos and a bass, which you’d call contrabass, I think, in classical terms, but I call double bass, because I’m from Birmingham. And that was a really great sound. We had eight violins all set up in here, all at once, and it was just an incredibly good sound.

The song was written during Harrison’s 1991 tour of Japan.

He wrote everything down, a lot of stuff. A lot of it would be just legal pads and you’d go through and the whole thing would be full, and you’d get another one underneath it and the whole thing would be full. He never wrote instructions, he’d just write notes, like “‘Rising Sun’, cello, chunky cello part with wobble,” you know, something just in his language. And Jeff [Lynne] looks and is like, “Oh great, wobble, yeah, we’ll put a bit of wobble on there and a bit of chunk there.” They obviously knew what they were talking about.

‘Rising Sun’ was included on the 2009 compilation Let It Roll: Songs By George Harrison.