The recording was made with minimal participation from Harrison's bandmates; instead, he created the track with tabla player Anil Bhagwat and other Indian musicians from the Asian Music Circle in London.

Author Jonathan Gould describes the song's slow sitar introduction as "one of the most brazenly exotic acts of stylistic experimentation ever heard on a popular LP".

[8][9] Music critic Richie Unterberger describes the song as the Beatles' "first all-out excursion" in raga rock,[10] a genre that author Nicholas Schaffner says was "launched" by Harrison's use of sitar on "Norwegian Wood".

[11] Harrison wrote "Love You To" in early 1966[7] while the Beatles were enjoying an unusually long period free of professional commitments, due to their inability to find a suitable film project.

[19][20] This meeting took place at the home of the AMC's founders, Ayana and Patricia Angadi, whose network of friends and visitors added to Harrison's self-education in new forms of art, culture and politics.

[22] At the start of the sessions for the Beatles' Revolver album, Geoff Emerick, the band's recording engineer, gave the song the working title of "Granny Smith", after the variety of apple.

[23][24][nb 1] The song was partly inspired by Harrison's experimentation with the hallucinogenic drug LSD,[26][27] which he credited as a catalyst for increased awareness and his interest in Eastern philosophical concepts.

[40][41] As with all of the songs written by Harrison or Lennon and recorded by the Beatles in 1966, the lyrics to "Love You To" marked a departure from the standard love-song themes that had defined the group's previous work.

[43] According to music critic John Harris, the lines "There's people standing round / Who'll screw you in the ground / They'll fill you in with all the sins you'll see" serve as one of the first examples of the Beatles' ideology aligning with that of the emerging 1960s counterculture, by highlighting the division between traditional mores and an LSD-inspired perspective.

[44][nb 2] Authors Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc recognise this and other statements in "Love You To" as part of the Beatles' espousal of anti-materialism from 1966 onwards, a message that, inspired by the LSD experience, suggested a "psychedelic vision of society".

[49][50] Rodriguez comments that "Love You To" "[made] explicit the Indian influence implicit throughout the entire album",[51] as songs such as "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Got to Get You into My Life", together with the non-album single tracks "Paperback Writer" and "Rain", all incorporate drone sounds or otherwise display the limited harmonic movement that typifies the genre.

[52][53][nb 4] In a 1997 interview, Harrison said that the song's inclusion reflected the band's willingness to experiment during this period, adding: "We were listening to all sorts of things, Stockhausen, avant-garde music, whatever, and most of it made its way onto our records.

"[57] Musicologist Walter Everett also identifies Harrison as the main sitar player on the recording,[71] as does Peter Lavezzoli, author of The Dawn of Indian Music in the West.

[1] Leng comments that, as on "Norwegian Wood", Harrison "is still playing the sitar like a guitar player [on the recording], using blues and rock 'n' roll bends rather than the intensely intricate Indian equivalents".

[7][78] Although he was unaware of the band's popularity and had yet to hear "Norwegian Wood",[59] Shankar was impressed with Harrison's humility[79][80] as the guitarist downplayed his sitar recordings with the Beatles as merely "experiments".

[93][94][nb 9] In advance of the release, EMI had issued the songs to radio stations throughout July, in increments, to prepare the Beatles' audience for the progression the band had made with their latest work.

According to cultural historian Simon Philo, the album represented "pop's most sustained deployment of Indian instruments, musical form and even religious philosophy thus far – which all came together most notably on ['Love You To']".

[98] By that point, the Beatles' association with Indian music had been firmly established,[20][99] after, at Harrison's suggestion, the band stopped over in Delhi on the return flight from their concerts in the Far East.

The opening descent of shimmering harplike notes beckoned even those who resisted Indian music, while the lyrics melded the mysticism of the East ... with the pragmatism of the West, and the hedonism of youth culture.

"[113] As an example of what Turner views as older pop journalists being unable to evaluate the new progressive music of 1966, Allen Evans of the NME described the song as an "Oriental-sounding piece"[114] with "sitar jangles" and a "Kama Sutra-type lyric".

"[116] Disc and Music Echo's review of Revolver took the form of a track-by-track rundown by Ray Davies of the Kinks,[117] whose July 1965 single "See My Friends" became widely viewed as one of the first pop songs to incorporate Eastern elements.

[122] An exception was New York critic Richard Goldstein, who praised the album as "a revolutionary record",[121] and later wrote that the song's lyrics "exploded with a passionate sutra quality".

"[124] While it was the songs and voices of Lennon and McCartney that led the Beatles to enduring influence, Harrison's embrace of Indian music added a welcome, if wholly unexpected, note to the proceedings, instantly and forever changing Western awareness of the Asian subcontinent.

"[1] Music critic Lester Bangs termed "Love You To" "the first injection of ersatz Eastern wisdom into rock", while Peter Doggett credits Harrison's spiritual concerns with inspiring "an entire [new] genre of songwriting".

[10] Although he finds the melody "sourly repetitious", Ian MacDonald writes that the track is "distinguished by the authenticity of its Hindustani classical instrumentation and techniques", and admires Harrison's understanding of the genre.

[30] In a 2009 review for Paste magazine, Mark Kemp described Revolver as the album on which the Beatles "completed their transformation from the mop tops of three years earlier into bold, groundbreaking experimental rockers", and added: "Harrison's 'Love You To' is pure Indian raga – sitar and tablas punctuated by the occasional luminous guitar riff jolting through the song's paranoid, drug-fueled lyrics like a blinding ray of sun into a dark forest.