Published Oops/Ganga Genre Hindustani blues Label Dark Horse | Released 5 November 1982 Length 3:46 Writer(s) George Harrison | |
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"Circles" is a song by English musician George Harrison, released as the final track of his 1982 album Gone Troppo. Harrison wrote the song in India in 1968 while he and the Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The theme of the lyrics is reincarnation. The composition reflects the cyclical aspect of human existence as, according to Hindu doctrine, the soul continues to pass from one life to the next. Although the Beatles never formally recorded it, "Circles" was among the demos the group made at Harrison's home, Kinfauns, in May 1968, while considering material for their double album The Beatles.
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Harrison revisited "Circles" during the sessions for his 1979 album George Harrison before he finally recorded it for Gone Troppo. Over this period, Harrison had softened the spiritual message in his work and had also begun to forgo the music business for a career as a film producer with his company HandMade Films. The song was produced by Harrison, Ray Cooper and former Beatles engineer Phil McDonald, with recording taking place at Harrison's Friar Park studio between May and August 1982. The track features extensive use of keyboards and synthesizer, with Billy Preston, Jon Lord and Mike Moran among the contributing musicians.
A slow, meditative song, "Circles" has received a mixed response from reviewers, some of whom find it overly gloomy. In the United States, it was issued as the B-side of the album's second single, "I Really Love You", in February 1983. As the closing track on Gone Troppo, "Circles" was the last song heard on a new Harrison album until 1987, when he returned with Cloud Nine.
Background and composition
"Circles" was one of several songs that George Harrison wrote in Rishikesh, India, when he and his Beatles bandmates were attending Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation course in the spring of 1968. Aside from providing an opportunity to progress with meditation techniques, the two-month stay marked Harrison's return to the guitar after two years of studying the Indian sitar, partly under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar. Harrison biographer Simon Leng considers that "Circles" was composed on an organ, however, as most of Harrison's Indian-inspired melodies since 1966 had been. Leng writes of "fugue-like keyboard parts" on the song and "bass figures" that partly recall the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Author Ian Inglis considers that "Circles" "displays a direct connection with the unspoken psychedelia" of Harrison's Beatles tracks "Blue Jay Way" and "Long, Long, Long".
The song's lyrical theme is reincarnation, in keeping with its composer's absorption in Hindu philosophy – a preoccupation that had led the Beatles to the Maharishi's teachings and would result in Harrison's introduction to the Hare Krishna movement in December 1968. Harrison had first taken reincarnation as his theme for "Art of Dying", which he began writing in 1966, and it would continue to be the focus of many of his compositions as a solo artist, notably the 1973 hit "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)". Theologian Dale Allison highlights "Circles" as the only Harrison song to use the term "reincarnate", however, and he also notes the composer's use of the word "soul" "in its proper metaphysical sense".
Allison describes the lyrics as "a clear statement of reincarnation", as well as "the most blatant example" of Harrison's desire to pass on to a "'higher' and better world" at death, and so escape the cycle of rebirth in the material world. In the song's choruses, the lines "He who knows does not speak / He who speaks does not know" quote the Chinese sage and author Lao-Tse, whose work Tao Te Ching inspired Harrison's 1968 composition "The Inner Light". Elsewhere in the lyrics to "Circles", Harrison contemplates the changing nature of friendship as, over the course of lifetimes, according to Inglis, "our enemies become our companions, affections turn into hatred".
Lindsay Planer of AllMusic writes that Harrison carried out "significant lyrical embellishments" after debuting the song in 1968. On the released recording, he concludes with a statement on how to break the circle of repetition: "When loss and gain and up and down / Become the same, then we stop going in circles." Allison interprets this conclusion, and Harrison's worldview generally, as espousing the need to recognise the illusory nature of the material world, saying: "All the multiplicity and diversity are in truth manifestations of the one hidden and divine reality … opposites are not opposites. To understand that up is down and that gain is loss is to be … on one's way to escaping from the material world."
Musically, Leng views the "chromatic melodic web" of "Circles" as appropriate for conveying the "repetition and entrapment" of reincarnation, as the soul passes through one human life to another. The song is in the key of F major, although, in Leng's estimation, the melody "yearn[s] for resolution in E minor … revolving in dissonance like a lost soul awaiting its place in the reincarnation checkout line".
The Beatles' demo
"Circles" was one of five Harrison compositions that the Beatles demoed before recording their 1968 double album, The Beatles, also known as the White Album. The song was taped in late May 1968 at Kinfauns, Harrison's home in Esher, using his Ampex four-track recorder. Although never released officially, the demo began circulating on bootleg compilations in the early 1990s.
Harrison played organ on the track, taping two parts on the instrument. The use of keyboards contrasted with the mainly acoustic-guitar backing otherwise employed on the Beatles' Esher demos; author and critic Richie Unterberger describes the keyboard sound as "an eerie organ that seems to have been dragged out of a dusty, disused church closet". In his book Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald credits the instrument as a harmonium and writes that, rather than performing the song alone, Harrison was "shadowed by a tentative … bass-line" from Paul McCartney.
As with another Harrison composition inspired by the Beatles' time in Rishikesh – "Sour Milk Sea" – the group did not attempt to record "Circles" for the White Album. With the band's songwriting output at an unprecedentedly high level, Harrison's "Not Guilty" was similarly left off the album, even though the group had completed a recording of that track.
Recording
In 1978, Harrison returned to both "Circles" and "Not Guilty" during the sessions for his sixth post-Beatles solo album, George Harrison. Although "Not Guilty" appeared on that release the following year, "Circles" remained unused until 1982, when Harrison again revisited it while working on Gone Troppo. By this point in his career, Harrison had long softened the spiritual message of his work and, since the late 1970s, he had distanced himself from the Hare Krishna movement. Allison notes that Harrison nevertheless gave an in-depth interview to senior devotee Mukunda Goswami in September 1982, during which he shared his thoughts on reincarnation, meditation and chanting.
"Circles" was recorded at Harrison's Friar Park studio, in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, during sessions held between 5 May and 27 August 1982. Harrison co-produced the track with Ray Cooper and former Beatles engineer Phil McDonald. The backing musicians included keyboard players Billy Preston, Jon Lord and Mike Moran, while Harrison also played synthesizer, in addition to bass and slide guitar. Leng describes the song as Harrison's "first Hindustani blues" and, unlike the sparse 1968 recording, a track arranged with "rich instrumentation" that includes "gospel flourishes" from Preston, on piano and Hammond organ, and "Harrison's unique guitar tones".
Leng also comments on the seemingly unlikely pairing of Harrison and Lord, who was the keyboardist for heavy rock bands such as Deep Purple and Whitesnake. Acknowledging the close friendship between the two near-neighbours, Leng cites Lord's presence on the track as indicative of a preference for locally sourced contributors and "trusted pals" when Harrison made Gone Troppo. As another factor in the album's creation, Harrison felt increasingly removed from contemporary musical trends and more involved with his burgeoning film company, HandMade, whose recent successes had included Terry Gilliam's fantasy adventure Time Bandits (1981). While viewing "Circles" as "a throwback to the early days of enlightenment in the 1960s", Leng considers that the "ponderous, stuttering, meditative pace and bizarre, circular melodic structure" of the song evokes "the feeling of being transported to one of the parallel realities" depicted in Gilliam's film.
Release
"Circles" was issued on 5 November 1982 as the closing track on Gone Troppo, sequenced after Harrison's song from the Time Bandits soundtrack, "Dream Away". By this point, "Circles" had gained a degree of notoriety, as a title that frequently appeared on lists of the Beatles' unreleased compositions. The album's arrival coincided with heavy marketing of the Beatles' past work and a new television documentary, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the band's debut single, "Love Me Do". Writing in Mojo in 2011, John Harris described "Circles" as "one bit of Fabs-related intrigue" on a release that otherwise received little notice, due to Harrison's refusal to promote his "contract-finisher" with Warner Bros. Records, the distributor of his Dark Horse record label. Author Alan Clayson comments that the song's "sense of once more going through the old routine" matched its "world-weary lyrics" – a reflection of the artist's disenchantment after Warner's had rejected part of the content of his previous album, Somewhere in England.
Gone Troppo became Harrison's last album for five years, during which he continued to focus on film production, while occasionally contributing to film soundtracks. Among these projects, the HandMade comedy Water (1985) reunited four of the musicians who played on "Circles", as Moran wrote part of the film score (with Harrison), and Harrison, Lord, Moran and Cooper made a cameo appearance as "the Singing Rebels Band", along with Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr. In February 1983, "Circles" was released as the B-side to the album's second single in the United States, "I Really Love You".
Reception
Discussing the reception to Gone Troppo in their book Eight Arms to Hold You, Chip Madinger and Mark Easter note "Circles" as the only track "reflecting weightier matters" on what was otherwise Harrison's "frothiest" collection of songs to date, and they conclude: "Sadly, a decent album was lost in the shuffle of the rapidly changing marketplace of the early '80's." In a contemporary review for Musician magazine, Roy Trakin found that, following John Lennon's murder two years before, Harrison's "tortured honesty" undermined the album's "attempt to heal those psychic wounds with calm, offhanded music", and he added that "not even Billy Preston can rescue … the maudlin tautologies of the closing 'Circles'."
More impressed with Gone Troppo, Dave Thompson wrote in Goldmine in 2002 that, together with "Dream Away", "Circles" "stand[s] alongside any number of Harrison's minor classics". In his book The Unreleased Beatles, Richie Unterberger describes the song as "a pretty neat, if droning, reflection of Harrison's more somber spiritual sensibilities", and he views the 1968 demo as a version that "exerts by far the greater fascination" compared with Harrison's later recording. Unimpressed with the track, author John Winn dismisses "Circles" as "a depressing number that makes 'Blue Jay Way' sound like a Little Richard freakout". Ian MacDonald describes it as "a typically perceptive, if deeply gloomy, song about karma".
Simon Leng admires "Circles" as "one of [its] composer's most complex pieces" and pairs the song with "Beware of Darkness", as "a study in Harrison's unique harmonic sense". In light of its appearance as the final track on Gone Troppo, Leng adds: "'Circles' was so personal and eccentric that it seemed to close the book on George's recording career. It felt like he was making music only for himself."
Personnel
According to the Gone Troppo CD credits and Simon Leng: