I Me Mine
"I Me Mine" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1970 album Let It Be. Written by George Harrison, it was the last new track the group recorded before their break-up in April 1970. The song originated from their January 1969 rehearsals at Twickenham Film Studios when they were considering making a return to live performance. Written at a time of acrimony within the group, the lyrics lament humankind's propensity for self-centredness and serve as a comment on the discord that led to Harrison temporarily leaving the Beatles. The musical arrangement alternates between waltz-time verses and choruses played in the hard rock style.
The song reflects Harrison's absorption in Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and their denouncement of ego in favour of universal consciousness. When Harrison presented "I Me Mine" at Twickenham, John Lennon showed little interest and instead waltzed with Yoko Ono while the other Beatles rehearsed the song. Footage of the couple dancing was included in the Let It Be documentary film. In January 1970, by which point Lennon had privately left the group, the three remaining members formally recorded the song at EMI Studios in London for the Let It Be album. When preparing the album for release, producer Phil Spector extended the track by repeating the chorus and second verse, in addition to adding orchestration and a female choir.
Among music critics, several writers have identified "I Me Mine" as a powerful final performance by the Beatles and an apt statement from Harrison. The song has been referenced by some religious scholars in their commentary on egoism. Harrison titled his 1980 autobiography I, Me, Mine after the track. The original recording, lasting just 1:34, appeared on the Beatles' 1996 outtakes compilation Anthology 3, introduced by a mock announcement from Harrison referring to Lennon's departure.
Background and inspiration
wrote "I Me Mine" on 7 January 1969, during the second week of the Beatles' filmed rehearsals at Twickenham Film Studios in west London. The film project – which became known as Get Back and eventually Let It Be – formed part of the Beatles' proposed return to live performance for the first time since 1966. Harrison recalled that after spending two months in the United States in late 1968, he was "quite optimistic" about the new project, but the situation within the group "was just the same as it had been when we were last in the studio... There was a lot of trivia and games being played". For Harrison, the power struggle between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the constant presence of Lennon's girlfriend, avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, created an atmosphere that contrasted sharply with the creative freedom and camaraderie he had recently enjoyed with Bob Dylan and the Band in upstate New York.The 7 January rehearsal was marked by acrimony, as the Beatles argued over the direction of the project. Hours were given over to rehearsing McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" with little improvement, and McCartney confronted Lennon over his lack of new songs, drawing a sarcastic response from Lennon. Since the start of the project, Harrison had presented several new songs for consideration, only to see them given laborious treatment by the band or overlooked entirely. That day, he confronted his bandmates about their attitude to his songs; he later complained that due to their greater experience as songwriters, Lennon and McCartney viewed their own material as the priority and "I'd have to wait through ten of their songs before they'd even listen to one of mine". Harrison wrote the song at home that night, drawing inspiration from the divisive atmosphere in the band. The melody was inspired by either the incidental music on a BBC television programme he watched, Europa – The Titled and the Untitled, played by an Austrian brass band. or incidental music, composed by Tristram Cary for an episode of Out of the Unknown which aired prior to that programme on BBC2.
When discussing "I Me Mine", Harrison said he was addressing the "eternal problem" of egoism and that his perspective was informed by his past experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD. He said the concept was in keeping with Swami Vivekananda's teaching that an individual's goal in life was to realise their divine qualities by transcending ego concerns, which Harrison called "the little 'i'", and seeing themselves as part of "the big 'I'; i.e. OM, the complete whole, universal consciousness that is devoid of duality and ego".
Author Jonathan Gould describes the song as a "commentary on the selfishness" of Lennon and McCartney, while musicologist Walter Everett says that after Harrison had written "Not Guilty" in 1968 as a "defense against the tyranny of his songwriting comrades", "I Me Mine" was his "mocking complaint about their stifling egos". In their study of the tapes from the Get Back project, authors Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt write that Lennon and McCartney regularly overlooked Harrison's compositions, even when his songs were "far better than their own".
Composition
The verses of "I Me Mine" are in the key of A minor while the chorus is in A major. This technique of parallel minor/major contrast is common in the Beatles' songwriting and had been employed by Harrison in his 1968 songs "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Savoy Truffle". Everett likens the melody of the verses to the European folk music typified by Mary Hopkin's debut single for the Beatles' Apple record label, "Those Were the Days". He views this folk aspect as "well suited" to Harrison's use of the same "F-against-E7 sound" he first adopted in "I Want to Tell You". The composition originally included a flamenco-style instrumental passage but Harrison subsequently replaced this section with a chorus repeating the line "I me-me mine". In its final form, the structure comprises an intro, two combinations of verse and chorus, followed by a verse. The verse and chorus are also differentiated by their time signature: the former is in time while the latter is in.Musicologist Alan Pollack describes the song as "an interesting folk/blues stylistic hybrid with more than just a touch of the hard rocking waltz beat". The verse begins with two repeated phrases, each consisting of a shift from the i minor chord to a IV, emphasising the Dorian mode, followed by ♭VII, V7 and i minor chords. The verse continues with a minor iv chord for two bars before shifting to V7, after which a ♭9 melody note results in what musicologist Dominic Pedler terms the "dark drama" of an E7♭9 chord and an example of the Beatles' employment of an "exotic intensifier". There then follows a chromatically descending bass line over the i minor chord, leading to VI and the transition into the chorus. The latter presents as a heavy rock 12-bar blues but is abbreviated to 10 bars since the V chord functions as a re-transition to the verse. Pedler also comments on the unusual aspect of the song concluding on an ♭VI chord in A minor key.
The set of pronouns that form the song's title are a conventional way of referring to the ego in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. The lyrics reference the Bhagavad Gita 2:71-72, part of which advocates a life "devoid of any sense of mineness or egotism". According to spiritual biographer Gary Tillery, the song targets McCartney and Lennon "for being so fixated on their own interests" but also laments all of humankind's propensity for egocentricity. The lyrics state that this self-centredness is constant and in all actions and desires. Tillery says that the message is both ironic and tragic from a Hindu perspective, which contends that ego is merely an illusion; egocentricity is therefore akin to a single drop of water focusing on its own course at the expense of the ocean surrounding it.
Twickenham rehearsals
The rehearsals at Twickenham Film Studios were filmed and recorded by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg with the intention that the documentary film would accompany a televised concert by the Beatles. On the morning of 8 January, Harrison played "I Me Mine" to Ringo Starr while they waited for Lennon and McCartney to arrive. He introduced the song as a "heavy waltz" and joked to Starr, with reference to McCartney's plans for the concert: "I don't care if you don't want it in your show." Harrison said he might use the song in a musical he was planning to write with Apple press officer Derek Taylor about the company.The Beatles spent considerable time rehearsing "I Me Mine" on 8 January, performing it a total of 41 times. As rehearsed, the song was just a minute and a half in length. McCartney and Starr provided enthusiastic support, according to author John Winn, while Lennon "mostly opts out". Lennon ridiculed the song. In Sulpy and Schweighardt's description of the rehearsals, Lennon "jokes that a collection of freaks can dance along with George's waltz" and he tells Harrison to "get lost – that the Beatles only play rock and roll and there's no place in the group's playlist for a Spanish waltz". McCartney also mocked "I Me Mine" by singing in a Spanish accent. According to Beatles biographer Kenneth Womack, Lennon's derision, which followed his ignoring suggestions from Harrison regarding musical arrangements over the previous days, was an example of Lennon "baiting" his bandmate. Womack says this was informed by Harrison being the most outspoken of the Beatles in objecting to Ono's constant presence, and by Lennon's annoyance at Harrison's abundance of new songs. In Everett's view, Lennon's comments about "I Me Mine" suggest he was "jealous at Harrison's widening vocal range as well as his confidence in his compositional abilities".
Lennon made similarly derogatory remarks that day about McCartney's ballads "Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road". According to Gould, Harrison was particularly upset that his bandmates griped about the time spent learning "I Me Mine" yet then indulged in "a laborious rehearsal of a song like 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' which struck George as a paragon of pop inanity". On 10 January, Harrison walked out of the sessions, weary of what he considered to be McCartney's overbearing attitude and Lennon's lack of engagement with the project.