In the months before his death, former Beatle George Harrison was finishing a last album in secrecy. According to Britain’s Sunday Times, Harrison played the album for his friends and family in a private room at a Los Angeles hospital on Sunday, four days before he died of cancer at the age of 58.
Harrison was completing 25 previously unreleased tracks in a studio at his Friar Park mansion in Oxfordshire, England. His wife Olivia and son Dhani said they would release the album as a tribute to Harrison‘s courage.
Portrait of a Leg End, the album’s working title, contains new songs as well as some that date to the 1980s. Unlike his last song, “Horse to Water,” recorded with Dhani, the tracks do not allude to his illness but are instead an effort by the former Beatle to put his musical legacy in order.
Jim Keltner, a California-based musician who played the drums on some of the tracks, told reporters the album is very close to completion.
“There is a certain soulfulness about George’s music that doesn’t need a lot once he has put that voice on. There will be people who argue that it is underproduced and maybe there should be more on it. Knowing George, I have a feeling he would rather it be as simple and as direct as possible,” he said.
Portrait of a Leg End could repeat the success of John Lennon and Yoko Ono‘s Double Fantasy album, which sold millions of copies after Lennon’s murder in New York in 1980.
It has also been reported that British politicians are calling for Harrison to be granted posthumous knighthood, which would require a change in Britain’s honor system under which only military personnel can be given the “Sir” title after their death.
Harrison was cremated in Los Angeles on Thursday. His ashes are expected to be spread on the Ganges or another holy river in India.
