it had been when we were last in the studio ... There was a lot of trivia and games being played." For Harrison, the power struggle between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the constant presence of Lennon's girlfriend, avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, created an atmosphere that contrasted sharply with the creative freedom and camaraderie he had recently enjoyed with Bob Dylan and the Band in upstate New York. When writing the song, Harrison drew inspiration from the divisive atmosphere in the band. The 7 January rehearsal was marked by acrimony, as the Beatles argued over the direction of the project. Hours were given over to rehearsing McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" with little improvement, and McCartney confronted Lennon over his lack of new songs, drawing a sarcastic response from Lennon. Since the start of the project, Harrison had presented several new songs for consideration, only to see them given laborious treatment by the band or overlooked entirely. That day, he confronted his bandmates about their attitude to his songs; he later complained that due to their greater experience as songwriters, Lennon and McCartney viewed their own material as the priority and "I'd have to wait through ten of their songs before they'd even listen to one of mine." In their study of the tapes from the Get Back project, authors Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt write that Lennon and McCartney regularly overlooked Harrison's compositions, even when his songs were "far better than their own". When discussing "I Me Mine", Harrison said he was addressing the "eternal problem" of egoism and that his perspective was informed by his past experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD. He said the concept was in keeping with Swami Vivekananda's teaching that an individual's goal in life was to realise their divine qualities by transcending ego concerns, which Harrison called "the little 'i'", and seeing themselves as part of "the big 'I'; i.e. OM, the complete whole, universal consciousness that is devoid of duality and ego". Author Jonathan Gould describes the song as a "commentary on the selfishness" of Lennon and McCartney, while musicologist Walter Everett says that after Harrison had written "Not Guilty" in 1968 as a "defense against the tyranny of his songwriting comrades", "I Me Mine" was his "mocking complaint about their stifling egos". Harrison wrote the song at home that night. The melody was inspired by the incidental music on a BBC