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"Only a Northern Song" is a song written by George Harrison and performed by the Beatles. It was recorded in 1967 during the sessions for ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' but was omitted from that album. Instead, the song featured in the Beatles' 1968 animated film ''Yellow Submarine'' and appeared on its soundtrack album, released early the following year. "Only a Northern Song" has been described as Harrison's "personal denunciation of the Beatles' music publishing business". ==Background and composition== Harrison described "Only a Northern Song" as "a joke relating to Liverpool, Holy City in the North of England. In addition the song was copyrighted to Northern Songs Ltd. which I didn't own." Northern Songs was a music publishing company formed in 1963 primarily to exploit Lennon–McCartney compositions. The company had subsequently been floated in 1965, but while John Lennon and Paul McCartney each owned 15 per cent of the public company's shares, Harrison owned only 0.8 per cent. Harrison was contracted by Northern Songs as a songwriter only, and because the company retained the copyright of its published songs, according to author Brian Southall, "Lennon and McCartney, as major shareholders, would earn more from () songs than him." Reflecting the inequality of this arrangement, musicologist Ian MacDonald writes, the song employs "mild dissonance" and "nasally sarcastic" key-changes that complement the "suppressed bitterness" of Harrison's words. The lyrics feature such self-referential lines as: "It doesn't really matter what chords I play / What words I say or time of day it is / As it's only a Northern Song." Harrison also commented that, in addition to his dissatisfaction with Northern Songs, particularly the company's major shareholder, Dick James: "I was starting to get a bit of an idea that ... you'd only written half a song and he () would be trying to assign it." In MacDonald's estimation, "Only a Northern Song" suggests that Harrison "had yet to recover his enthusiasm for being a Beatle", after he had threatened to leave the group following their final live concert at Candlestick Park on 29 August 1966. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Only a Northern Song」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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