The Last New George Harrison Album

George's last album, "Brainwashed," is being released this Tuesday. I found most of it on the web and it is just exquisite. There is an instrumental called "Marwa Blues" that will make you cry it is so lovely. I think this is as good as anything he ever did and it is a nice way of saying goodbye. I miss George.

Here's an article about the album from Rolling Stone.com


Behind George's "Brainwashed"

Harrison called the shots on his final album


When George Harrison died on November 29th, 2001, he left behind more than a dozen songs for what would become his tenth, and final, solo album.
The songs -- recorded during a period when the guitarist was both struggling with cancer and recovering from being stabbed by an intruder at his estate outside London -- are some of the most beautiful, uplifting pieces of music of his career. Brainwashed, due out November 19th, is full of bluesy slide guitar, plenty of ukulele and Harrison's distinctive voice. Tunes such as "Looking for My Life," "Rising Son" and "Stuck Inside a Cloud" -- the album's first single -- are on par with the finest moments on his 1970 solo masterpiece, All Things Must Pass.

Retailers are already predicting brisk sales for Brainwashed. "It's a perfect time for George's album," says Dave Alder, vice president of marketing and promotion for Virgin Megastores. According to Alder, the Harrison album fits in with other Beatles-related items on sale later this year, including a paperback version of the enormous Anthology book, the Hard Day's Night DVD and a new Paul McCartney concert DVD. "We'll be featuring the album at the front of all of our stores," Alder says. "There's a curiosity among Beatles fans about George's last album."

But Harrison didn't leave many things to chance when he was working on Brainwashed. Since he knew he might not be around to complete the album, he gave specific guidelines to the two men he trusted to finish it for him: his son, Dhani, and his old friend and fellow Traveling Wilbury Jeff Lynne.

"My dad knew what this album was going to be like," says Dhani, twenty-four, George and Olivia Harrison's only child. "He didn't want it to be too polished." Dhani says George talked "a million times" about his ideas for the record -- everything from the running order of the tracks to the artwork on the cover. "The majority of the detail came from what he'd imparted to me in the years we'd spent in the studio just mucking about," says Dhani. "I knew what he'd like and what he'd hate. There was never a really hard decision to make."

Harrison asked Lynne to produce the album before he got sick. The two had worked together on Harrison's last solo album -- 1987's Cloud Nine -- and Harrison knew that Lynne had a tendency to lay a bit of schmaltz on the albums he produced. "He said, 'If you're going to do this record,'" says Lynne, "I don't want it too posh. I want it more like a demo. I had to make it sound like a George Harrison record. Not like somebody else messed with it."

Many of the songs were near completion when Harrison died. One, a cover of the old standard "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," was finished months before Harrison's death. Listening to the demo tapes, Dhani and Lynne found that Harrison had left them little messages. "Believe it or not," Lynne notes, "it wasn't my idea to put those strings on 'Rising Sun.'" The small string section -- two violins, violas and cellos, plus a contrabass -- was brought in because Harrison had hummed a melody for those instruments on the demo.

"Marwa Blues," an Indian-sounding instrumental jam, caused Lynne and Dhani minor difficulty, because Harrison had recorded it with multiple guitar solos. "We went through it almost note by note to figure out what he really wanted to say in his solo," says Lynne.

"After we'd done a couple of tracks, Dhani started to feel like George was with us," Lynne adds. "The sadness kind of disappeared, and it became a celebration of this great music George had done. George was such an original guy. He always came up with a different answer. The songs still say what he would have said had he been here."

JENNY ELISCU