Describe a Song That Means Something to You

The song I'd like to talk about is an old one — 'Here Comes the Sun' by The Beatles — which I realise is hardly an original choice, but the reason it matters to me has very little to do with the song's fame and everything to do with my grandfather.

I first heard it properly when I was about eight or nine, in my grandfather's tiny study, which always smelled of old paper and instant coffee. He had a battered cassette player — this was long after cassettes were obsolete, but he refused to upgrade — and a shoebox of tapes he'd collected as a young man. On slow afternoons he'd put one on while he pottered around, and this song was his favourite. He used to conduct along with the little guitar riff using whatever was in his hand — a pen, a biscuit — which delighted me endlessly as a kid. He'd also tell me, completely deadpan, that the band had written it specifically about our town's miserable winters, and I believed him for an embarrassing number of years. It became our little ritual — I'd beg for that particular tape the way other children begged for cartoons.

The song itself is deceptively simple. It was written by George Harrison, apparently in a friend's garden after a miserable winter of business meetings, and it's essentially about relief — that feeling when a long, dark stretch finally breaks. 'Here comes the sun, and I say, it's all right.' There's nothing clever or cryptic about it, but the warmth in it is completely genuine, and you can hear the sigh of relief in every bar. Even the structure feels like ice thawing, if that doesn't sound too pretentious.

As for what it means to me — my grandfather passed away when I was in my late teens, and for a while I couldn't listen to the song at all. But over the years it's transformed from something painful into something closer to a visit. When it comes on, I'm eight years old again in that study, and the smell of old paper comes back with almost physical force. It's astonishing how music does that; no photograph of him has anywhere near the same power.

These days I've also inherited his habit, in a way — the song has become my personal reset button. I play it deliberately after bad weeks, at the end of winters, once even in an airport at 5 a.m. after a cancelled flight, and it reliably loosens whatever knot the week has tied. So it operates on two levels for me: it's a three-minute memorial to someone I loved, and it's also exactly what George Harrison meant it to be — a reminder that dark stretches end. Not bad for a song that's older than my parents.