Grey Cloudy Lies

He returned to the song two years later when filled with despondency and self-doubt in response to the scathing reviews that his 1974 North American tour with Ravi Shankar and Dark Horse album had received from several music critics.

[23][24] Chief among these detractors was Rolling Stone magazine,[3][25] which, amid what author Elliot Huntley terms the "tsunami of bile" unleashed on Harrison following the tour,[26] used its review of his delayed Dark Horse album to attack him personally and as an artist.

[28] Harrison returned to the United States in February 1975[29] to oversee projects by artists signed to his Dark Horse record label in Los Angeles,[30] and in order to spend time with his new girlfriend, Olivia Arias, in her hometown.

[38][nb 1] In September 1975, during his track-by-track discussion of the album with BBC Radio 1's Paul Gambaccini,[40] he described "Grey Cloudy Lies" as "one of those depressing, 4 o'clock in the morning sort of songs".

[1][42][43] Leng identifies a similarity between the song's opening sequence of chords and those in Billy Preston's 1969 single "That's the Way God Planned It", which Harrison produced for the Beatles' Apple record label, yet "Grey Cloudy Lies" is "emotionally a million miles away from that stirring gospel mood".

[44] The first verse sets the tone for what Leng describes as "an uncomfortable few minutes":[45] Now, I thought to close my mouth With a padlock on the night Leave the battlefield behind me Stay out the fight Not lose my sight.Harrison quoted these words in his interview with Gambaccini, to illustrate the point that "after talking for a lot, you know, sometimes it's nice to be quiet".

While Leng and Inglis observe that the singer appears to have courted death[45] and even contemplated suicide,[53] Allison, a Christian theologian, attaches significant importance to the line, on an album that he identifies as "the anomaly" in Harrison's solo work, due to the absence of "positive theological statements" in any of the songs.

[63][64] Leng also compares "Grey Cloudy Lies" to the posthumously released "Stuck Inside a Cloud", which he terms the lyrical "blood brother" to this 1975 song, due to its "harrowing" description of the cancer that would claim Harrison's life.

[65] Harrison recorded "Grey Cloudy Lies" in Los Angeles, while immersed in the city's music-business scene – and with it, author Robert Rodriguez notes, "LA's 1970s drug culture"[66] – during the spring and summer of 1975.

[30] Harrison's role as owner of A&M-distributed Dark Horse Records saw him overseeing projects there by new signings Attitudes, Stairsteps and Henry McCullough,[67] as well as socialising in circles that he admitted to finding depressing.

"[92] Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone noted the lack of religious references in the album's lyrics before adding: "But 'Grey Cloudy Lies' makes up in its cathectic repetition of Krishna homiletics for whatever the others have skipped ...

"[93] In Melody Maker, Ray Coleman said the album was a "lovely collection of songs by a musician with integrity" and that "Grey Cloudy Lies" was "perhaps the most difficult of all the tracks to grab hold of" on initial listening.

[5] Among Harrison's biographers, Simon Leng comments on "Grey Cloudy Lies": "Even though Leonard Cohen and, later, the Smiths made a living from songs about depression, the justification for recording a piece like this on what was ostensibly an entertainment product is questionable.

[82] Writing for the music website Something Else!, Nick DeRiso opines that, with Extra Texture, Harrison "couldn't have strayed further from his religious moorings – or from the free-spirited uplift that made his initial post-Beatles projects such pleasant surprises", and he dismisses "Grey Cloudy Lies" as "one of [the album's] most wrist-slashingly awful songs".

[95] Ian Inglis offers a favourable assessment, describing it as one of Harrison's "simplest and most poignant" compositions, and a song of "great charm, energy, and beauty" with lyrics that have "the status and structure of a poem".

"[53] Reviewing the 2014 reissue of Extra Texture, for Paste magazine, Robert Ham views "the desperate 'Grey Cloudy Lies'" as a "[moment] when Harrison's focus returns", and a ballad that "cut[s] deep".