Harrison began writing the song in Los Angeles in response to Ted Templeman, a staff producer at Warner Bros. Records, suggesting he compose something in a similar style to his 1971 track "Deep Blue".

Recorded at Harrison's FPSHOT studio in Oxfordshire, the track features dobro, jazz piano, tuba and prominent chorus vocals, as well as voices and sounds captured in his local pub.

[15] Among the psychedelic imagery he employs,[14] he describes the sensation of feeling elevated far above the ground, with his legs appearing to be "like high-rise buildings" and his head so "high up in the sky" that he began to "fry like bacon".

[26] Author Ian Inglis identifies several "Dylanesque characters" in the narrative, including "Richard III", "Seven naked native girls" and "Lone-ranger smoking doobies".

Inglis comments that whereas Harrison's songs from earlier in the 1970s "Simply Shady" and "Tired of Midnight Blue" offer a self-rebuke on drug-taking, the singer reacts to the characters he encounters in "Soft-Hearted Hana" with the statement: "I'm still smiling.

[26] Inglis likens Harrison's female personification of Hana amid "fruit and grain" to a literary device employed by English poet John Keats in his "Ode to Autumn".

He cites this similarity when concluding that "comparisons between the Beatles and the young Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century (Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Keats, among others) may legitimately extend to their creative use of language, as well as their public fascination.

[37] The musicians accompanying Harrison on the song were keyboard player Neil Larsen and the rhythm section of Willie Weeks (bass) and Andy Newmark (drums).

[42][nb 3] Newman's horn arrangement included a prominent tuba part,[24] while chorus vocals on the "I'm still smiling" middle-eights were sung by Harrison and Steve Winwood.

'Not Guilty,' 'Here Comes the Moon' and 'Soft-Hearted Hana' transport us back into psychedelic lotus land, but their tone is so airy and whimsical that the nostalgia is as seductive as it is anachronistic.

Thribb also welcomed the release, saying that "light-heartedness seems to infiltrate the music on this album, almost to the point of light-headedness", and he added of "Soft-Hearted Hana": "Eric Clapton first played me this a while back, and chuckled gently over the curious wobble speeds employed in the final chorus ...

The reference to swimming in the midst of a "Richard III" shows the millionaire had not lost touch with the toilet humor on which the British Empire was built.

[24] In his retrospective review for AllMusic, Richard Ginell was unimpressed by the album but he recognised "Soft-Hearted Hana" as one of the rare "quirks" among a mostly bland collection of songs and "a strange, stream-of-consciousness Hawaiian hallucination".

[1] Chip Madinger and Mark Easter recognise the song as an early indication of Harrison's fondness for popular music from the pre-rock and roll era.

[42] Harrison subsequently indulged his love of 1930s jazz,[68] specifically Cab Calloway, in two of the songs he wrote for the soundtrack of the 1986 HandMade comedy Shanghai Surprise: "Hottest Gong in Town", which again features a Morton-style piano part,[69] and "Zig Zag".