[5] At Woodstock in November,[6] Harrison started a long-lasting friendship with Bob Dylan[5] and experienced a creative equality with the Band that contrasted with John Lennon and Paul McCartney's dominance in the Beatles.

[13] Once back in London, and with his compositions continually overlooked for inclusion on releases by the Beatles,[14][15] Harrison found creative fulfilment in extracurricular projects that, in the words of his musical biographer, Simon Leng, served as an "emancipating force" from the restrictions imposed on him in the band.

[16] His activities during 1969 included producing Apple signings Billy Preston and Doris Troy, two American singer-songwriters whose soul and gospel roots proved as influential on All Things Must Pass as the music of the Band.

[68][nb 4] "I Dig Love" resulted from Harrison's early experiments with slide guitar, a technique to which Bramlett had introduced him,[67] in order to cover for guitarist Dave Mason's departure from the Friends line-up.

[71] Other songs on All Things Must Pass, all written during the first half of 1970, include "Awaiting on You All", which reflected Harrison's adoption of chanting through his involvement with the Hare Krishna movement;[72][73] "Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)", a tribute to the original owner of Friar Park;[74] and "Beware of Darkness".

[59] Harrison wrote "Apple Scruffs", which was one of a number of Dylan-influenced songs on the album,[79] towards the end of production on All Things Must Pass, as a tribute to the diehard fans who had kept a vigil outside the studios where he was working.

[81] While identifying hard rock, country and Motown among the other genres on the album, Leng writes of the "plethora of new sounds and influences" that Harrison had absorbed through 1969 and now incorporated, including "Krishna chants, gospel ecstasy, Southern blues-rock [and] slide guitar".

[116] Harrison recorded the following songs during the All Things Must Pass sessions but, until their inclusion on some editions of the 50th anniversary box set, they had never received an official release:[117] The precise line-up of contributing musicians is open to conjecture.

[131] Gibbins' bandmates Pete Ham, Tom Evans and Joey Molland provided rhythm acoustic-guitar parts that, in keeping with Spector's Wall of Sound principles, were to be "felt but not heard".

[73] Other contributors included Procol Harum's Gary Brooker, on keyboards, and pedal steel player Pete Drake,[132] the last of whom Harrison flew over from Nashville for a few days of recording.

[137] Simon Leng consulted Voormann, Barham and Molland for his chapter covering the making of All Things Must Pass and credits Tony Ashton as one of the keyboard players on both versions of "Isn't It a Pity".

[156] Music historian Richie Unterberger comments that, typical of the Beatles' solo work, the precise dates for the recording of All Things Must Pass are uncertain, a situation that contrasts with the "meticulous documentation" available for the band's studio activities.

[195][196] Although Harrison had estimated in a New York radio interview that the solo album would take no more than eight weeks to complete,[197][198] recording, overdubbing and mixing on All Things Must Pass lasted for five months, until late October.

[231][232] The gnomes had recently been delivered to Friar Park and placed on the lawn;[233] seeing the four figures there, and mindful of the message in the album's title, Feinstein immediately drew parallels with Harrison's former band.

[261][nb 24] Writing in the April 2001 issue of Record Collector, Peter Doggett described Harrison as "arguably the most successful rock star on the planet" at the start of 1971, with All Things Must Pass "easily outstripping other solo Beatles projects later in the year, such as [McCartney's] Ram and [Lennon's] Imagine".

[263] Harrison's so-called "Billboard double" – whereby one artist simultaneously holds the top positions on the magazine's albums and singles listings – was a feat that none of his former bandmates equalled until Paul McCartney and Wings repeated the achievement in June 1973.

[3][225][276] Harrison had usually contributed just two songs to a Beatles album;[277] in author Robert Rodriguez's description, critics' attention was now centred on "a major talent unleashed, one who'd been hidden in plain sight all those years" behind Lennon and McCartney.

[276][nb 28] William Bender of Time magazine described it as an "expressive, classically executed personal statement ... one of the outstanding rock albums in years", while Tom Zito of The Washington Post predicted that it would influence the discourse on "the [real] genius behind the Beatles".

[296] In their book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, Roy Carr and Tony Tyler were likewise lukewarm in their assessment, criticising the "homogeneity" of the production and "the lugubrious nature of Harrison's composing".

[142] Writing in The Beatles Forever in 1977, however, Nicholas Schaffner praised the album as the "crowning glory" of Harrison's and Spector's careers, and highlighted "All Things Must Pass" and "Beware of Darkness" as the "two most eloquent songs ... musically as well as lyrically".

[297] AllMusic's Richie Unterberger views All Things Must Pass as "[Harrison's] best ... a very moving work",[46] and Roger Catlin of MusicHound describes the set as "epic and audacious", its "dense production and rich songs topped off by the extra album of jamming".

[293] Filmmaker Martin Scorsese has written of the "powerful sense of the ritualistic on the album", adding: "I remember feeling that it had the grandeur of liturgical music, of the bells used in Tibetan Buddhist ceremonies.

"[299] Writing for Rolling Stone in 2002, Greg Kot described this grandeur as an "echo-laden cathedral of rock in excelsis" where the "real stars" are Harrison's songs;[54] in the same publication, Mikal Gilmore labelled the album "the finest solo work any ex-Beatle ever produced".

[300] In his 2001 review for Mojo, John Harris said that All Things Must Pass "remains the best Beatles solo album ... oozing both the goggle-eyed joy of creative emancipation and the sense of someone pushing himself to the limit".

[306] Another Rolling Stone critic, James Hunter, commented in 2001 on how All Things Must Pass "helped define the decade it ushered in", in that "the cast, the length, the long hair falling on suede-covered shoulders ... foretold the sprawl and sleepy ambition of the Seventies.

[309] Ian Inglis notes 1970's place in an era marking "the new supremacy of the singer-songwriter", through such memorable albums as Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, Van Morrison's Moondance and Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon, but that none of these "possessed the startling impact" of All Things Must Pass.

[310] Writing for Spectrum Culture, Kevin Korber describes the album as a celebration of "the power that music and art can have if we are free to create it and experience it on our own terms", and therefore "perhaps the greatest thing to come out of the breakup of the Beatles".

[327][nb 32] Harrison launched a website dedicated to the reissue, which offered, in the description of Chuck Miller of Goldmine magazine, "graphics and sounds and little Macromedia-created gnomes dancing and giggling and playing guitars in a Terry Gilliam-esque world".

[329] Titled All Things Must Pass: 30th Anniversary Edition, the new album contained five bonus tracks, including "I Live for You",[330] two of the songs performed for Spector at EMI Studios in May 1970 ("Beware of Darkness" and "Let It Down") and "My Sweet Lord (2000)", a partial re-recording of Harrison's biggest solo hit.

[357] The Uber Deluxe set adds a 44-page book on the creation of the 1970 triple album,[356] along with scale replica figurines of Harrison and the Friar Park gnomes, an illustration by Voormann, and Paramahansa Yogananda's text "Light from the Great Ones", among other extras.