The Heart Gently Weeps

This track, which features an interpolation of the famous Beatles/George Harrison song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," has the most complicated history of any of the 8 Diagrams tracks to leak thus far.

There was a report in XXL in early October that cited the delay of the release of 8 Diagrams from November 13 to December 4th. Of course, an entire Ghost-related fiasco would follow from this, but at the time, the delay was attributed to the fact that the Wu had to clear the first Beatles sample in history, & well, that takes time. It turns out this wasn't entirely true, though it was reported on MTV as well as other places, & in the end they just got the rights to interpolate the song.

So, on Wu's Myspace, an announcement comes that the Wu's version of the song will soon be featured on Loud's website. But the version that they put up doesn't seem to match the descriptions that the RZA has been giving about the track--that it features George's son Dhani Harrison playing acoustic guitar (a gift from Russel Crowe for wrapping American Gangster), John Frusciante on electric & Erykah Badu on the hook. The instrumental for this track seemed to simply be a straight sample of Jimmy Ponder's cover of the song--the same version that, incidentally, Ghostface had used on a particularly captivating unreleased track from somewhere around the Pretty Toney era.

Video of RZA speaking about the track:



About a week or so passes, in mass confusion, & then the actual version of the song surfaces. It's a dynamic & powerful track, & probably lives up to all the hype that surrounded it. It's so good that it's worth all the confusion that surrounded it. Yes, it would have probably been better if Meth's verse was longer, but there's very little to complain about on the whole. Ghost rekindles the spirit of his outlandish solo version from a few years ago, & Raekwon continues with his authoritative, subdued style. But the question remains, why release that dummy, demo version?