Brainwashed is the twelfth and final studio album by English rock musician and ex-Beatle George Harrison. It was released posthumously on 18 November 2002, almost a year after his death at age 58, and 15 years after his previous studio album, Cloud Nine. Recordings began over a decade before Harrison's death but were repeatedly delayed. The album's overdubs were completed by his son Dhani, session drummer Jim Keltner, and longtime friend and collaborator Jeff Lynne. Brainwashed reached the top 30 in the UK and the top 20 in the US, and received mostly favourable reviews. The album includes the singles "Stuck Inside a Cloud" and "Any Road". The instrumental "Marwa Blues" went on to receive the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, while "Any Road" was nominated for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
History
Harrison began recording the tracks that eventually were issued on Brainwashed as early as 1988 and continued to do so in a sporadic manner over the next decade and a half. Progress was delayed by business problems with Harrison's former manager, Denis O'Brien, as well as his work with the Traveling Wilburys, Ravi Shankar, and his work on The Beatles Anthology. In an interview in 1999, Harrison announced the title of his next album to be Portrait of a Leg End, and played songs entitled "Valentine", "Pisces Fish" and "Brainwashed". During the promotion for the 2001 re-release of All Things Must Pass, Harrison joked that the name of the album would be Your Planet Is Doomed – Volume One. After recuperating from being attacked in his home on 30 December 1999 by a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, Harrison focused on finishing the album, simultaneously sharing his ideas for all its details with his son Dhani – information that ultimately proved very valuable. Harrison successfully battled throat cancer in 1997; in 2001 he underwent surgery to remove a cancerous growth from one of his lungs, and radiotherapy for lung cancer which had metastasised to his brain. Once he realised it was an irreversible situation, he worked further on the album's songs – in conjunction with Dhani and his old collaborator Jeff Lynne – until he was unable to do more. Harrison's final work on the album was carried out at a recording studio in Switzerland shortly before his trip to the United States for cancer treatment. On 29 November 2001, Harrison died, leaving Brainwashed unfinished, but with a guide to completing it in the hands of his son and Lynne. After a few months away from the project, both Lynne and the younger Harrison returned to working on George's final songs and added the appropriate instruments, as per their composer's specifications, to the recordings. So close to completion was the project that the two used the exact timetable and session bookings that George himself had originally planned. After 14 years of indefinite delays and some difficult but rewarding sessions, the work was done and George’s final album was completed. Lynne reflected on Brainwashed in 2020: "His life was in those final songs, the things he got up to each day, like riding down the River Thames. Lots of very personal stuff. Some of them are really good. We gradually just filled them in. It was just about mixing them and making them sound like George would like them. You just had to go with your gut feeling."
Release
Brainwashed was released on 18 November 2002 to mostly favourable reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album scores 77, based on 16 reviews, which means "generally favorable". Writing in Uncut, Nick Hasted described it as "the best solo record by a Beatle since McCartney's Flowers in the Dirt ". Although he found that "a certain monotony creeps in towards the end", Hasted wrote that "Harrison's songs and singing represent a burst of form". The album was issued on LP and CD. A limited-edition CD box was also released, containing a Brainwashed poster, a Dark Horse sticker, a guitar pick with George's signature on it, and a bonus DVD with a seven-minute featurette about the making of the album. The album sold respectably, reaching number 18 in the US and going gold, and number 29 in the UK, where "Any Road" became a top 40hit single in spring 2003. A live tribute to Harrison by an assembly of his musical contemporaries, titled Concert for George, took place at London's Royal Albert Hall simultaneously with the release of the album. In 2004, Brainwashed's "Marwa Blues" won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. Also that year, Harrison's former bandmate Paul McCartney named the song as one of his all-time favourites. The album itself had also been nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album, as well as Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Three of the tracks from Brainwashed were included on Harrison's career-spanning compilation album, : "Any Road", "Marwa Blues" and "Rising Sun". Notably absent from the track listing was "Stuck Inside a Cloud", the first promotional single from Brainwashed.
