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Old Brown Shoe is a little gem of a track that needs to be hyped up more in my opinion. It was written by George Harrison and was the B Side to the single “Ballad of John and Yoko”. The opposites that come into play in the lyrics of the song (right-wrong, short-long, smile-frown, etc) are a reflection of Harrison’s turn towards Eastern Religion. The Old Brown Shoe is a metaphor for the materialistic possessions of the world, and ’stepping out of this shoe’ is another reference to the spiritual direction of this song.
It’s songs like this that make me wonder why Harrison was considered the ‘other’ Beatle – taking an underserved back-row seat behind the Lennon-McCartney engine that was the driving force behind much of the Beatles output. It’s clear Harrison had an immense talent for song-writing, and this proved true once the Beatles went their separate ways and Harrison released “All Things Must Pass”, the start of a hugely successful solo career. (”Something’ and “Here Comes the Sun” were other Beatles songs written by George.
Make sure to check out my other posts related to The Beatles or George Harrison.
September 12th, 2009 at 6:16 am
[...] This is the longest track name that the Beatles ever wrote, and is a song of few lyrics. Written by John Lennon in 1968 and released on the Beatles “White Album”, this song was about Lennon and Yoko Ono. Lennon uses a lot of opposites in the lyrics – this seems to be a common theme in some of the later Beatles recordings (”Hello Goodbye”, “Old Brown Shoe“). [...]