Let’s be honest; everyone dreams of having a song written about them. Love letters come and go, gifts will be lost to time when things go sour, and jewellery will tarnish, but music is forever. More so than any other art form, there is immortality in song, and in that way, Pattie Boyd will live forever.

Anyone can be a muse. Girlfriends, boyfriends, friends and lovers everywhere are captured daily, but not everyone can be a muse to multiple musical legends. And as her influence, beauty, and inspiration struck them, Boyd sat above them as a goddess-like figure. In the 1960s and beyond, the model and photographer had a hoard of musicians worshipping at her alter, penning odes and hymns to her love.

“I find the concept of being a muse understandable when you think of all the great painters, poets, and photographers who usually have had one or two,” Boyd said in a conversation with Taylor Swift for Harpers Bazaar, “The artist absorbs an element from their muse that has nothing to do with words, just the purity of their essence”. In her case, the artists were George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, and others, and they stood as the modern musical equivalents of Pablo Picasso or Leonardo Da Vinci.

As the woman behind some incredible songs, including one that Frank Sinatra called “the greatest love song of the past 50 years”, Boyd is a phenomenon. While muses are common, and their stories are always interesting, hers is staggering as it managed to balance drama, deceit and heartache with a clear throughpath of artistry and respect. Even after all the pain of divorces and separations, Boyd remained a beloved figure in these musicians’ lives, even gaining their permission to publish private love letters or stories, helping to reveal the wider history of these songs, their relationships and the figure herself.

Whether penned for a fleeting obsession, a lengthy marriage or a long-held heartache, Pattie Boyd’s love has been commemorated over and over in these ten tracks.

10 songs written about Pattie Boyd:

‘I Need You’ – The Beatles

Pattie Boyd and George Harrison met on the set of A Hard Day’s Night in 1964. After her walk-on role, Harrison was besotted. 18 months later, the pair were married. On The Beatles‘ 1965 album, Help!, the guitarist’s second-ever song he wrote for the band was the first he wrote for his wife.

“You don’t realise how much I need you / Love you all the time, never leave you,” it goes, penned as an ode to dedication, desire and the promise to be there. As far as love songs go, it’s everything you could want. And as the biggest band played it on earth, it heralded a period that Boyd considered her happiest. She was young, in love and in the “lovely heady atmosphere of being with The Beatles,” declaring, “Everything was fabulous.”

‘It’s All Too Much’ – The Beatles

“With your long blond hair and your eyes of blue…” Amidst an early acid trip, Harrison looks to his wife for grounding. Watching the world swirl around them in full technicolour, swelling the feelings of joy and adoration to a maximum, the pair’s love was heightened, too.

While this is predominantly a track about LSD, Boyd was right there in it, too, as the band began experimenting. She was there when Harrison and John Lennon first tried the drug, tripping alongside them. Throughout all the band’s wooziest numbers, anytime the guitarist got the pen, his wife was there. Whether explicitly or simply found in the imagery, her love is a vital piece of the psychedelic pattern.

‘Something’ – The Beatles

Perhaps one of the best-known and most beloved songs ever written, ‘Something’ is the love song that ends all love songs. To Frank Sinatra, it was one of the greatest ever written, and to the hundreds of artists that have covered the track, its timelessness proved the endurance and relatability of the sentiment.

But it was penned for one woman. In many ways, this track is not only Harrison’s opus on his muse but is his ultimate opus for The Beatles. More so than any other songs he wrote for the group, ‘Something’ lives in the leagues as one of their finest. With plain speaking language but holding grand sentiments, it’s an utterly adoring track that captures the purest feeling of love and hoping it lasts. That feeling is captured in the music video, too, as the Beatles and their wives are captured in love.

“He told me, in a matter-of-fact way, that he had written it for me. I thought it was beautiful,” Boyd remembers of the song. When asked about the thousands of cover versions and the hoards of artists that have taken their shot at redoing the track penned for her, her best-loved version is simple; “My favourite was the one by George Harrison, which he played to me in the kitchen at [their home] Kinfauns.”

‘For You Blue’ – The Beatles

Out of this entire list, I think if I were to pick a song I’d like to be written about me, it would be this one. Subverting the blues genre into a self-professed “happy-go-lucky” track, ‘For You Blue’ is fun, cool, seductive, and so joyful it bursts from your headphones.

“Because you’re sweet and lovely, girl, I love you,” Harrison sings, “I love you more than ever, girl, I do.” Influenced by his time spent with Bob Dylan in Woodstock and the start of his stretching out beyond the typical Beatles sound into the musical space that would colour his solo work, Boyd was still right there as his muse. In a heartwarming, wholesome and adoring lyrical ode, it’s a sweet one.

‘Layla’ – Eric Clapton

But then, this is where the trouble starts. “He switched on the tape machine, turned up the volume and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard,” Boyd remembers of the day Eric Clapton played her a song. “It was ‘Layla’, about a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him but is unavailable.”

“My first thought was: ‘Oh God, everyone’s going to know this is about me’,” Boyd continued. Dedicating the entire record, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, to Boyd, using his nickname for her, the guitarist made no secret of his adoration. But I’d dare anyone to hear a song like that written about them and not buckle at the knees. “The realisation that I had inspired such passion and creativity, the song got the better of me. I could resist no longer,” she said as they began their affair, eventually leaving the Beatle for him.

‘Wonderful Tonight’ – Eric Clapton

“If you want me, take me, I am yours… if you don’t want me, please break the spell that binds me. To cage a wild animal is a sin, to tame him is divine. My love is yours.” That’s what Clapton wrote to Boyd in one love letter before she left Harrison for him. But luckily, after she did, he kept the romance up for a brief while.

‘Wonderful Tonight’ is another song that’s certainly in the running as one of the best love songs ever written. Describing a doting partner watching his love get ready is exactly what every girl wants to hear when they ask their significant other if they look OK.

‘So Sad’ – George Harrison

“So sad, so bad, so sad, so bad,” Harrison made no secret of his feelings as his marriage with Boyd began to disintegrate. While the blame for the split is all too often placed on Boyd’s flame for Clapton, the Beatle strayed first and strayed plenty. The reason for their separation in 1974 was down to his own infidelity, most notably with Ringo Starr’s wife, which Boyd saw as the final stray.

Released that same year, ‘So Sad’ is Harrison’s heartbreak talking as he reckons with his loneliness at the end. Their divorce wouldn’t be finalised by 1977, and in 1979, Boyd married Clapton.

‘She’s Waiting’ – Eric Clapton

You would’ve thought that after chasing someone for years, you’d make every effort to keep them, or at the very least, you’d treat them right. But no. Quite soon after Boyd and Clapton married, the guitarist derailed into a life of alcoholism, infidelity and abuse as the model and muse was incredibly mistreated.

To make matters worse, he had the guts to still pen tracks about her, calling out his own behaviour but seemingly not stopping it. “You’ve been abusing her for far too long / Think you’re a king, she’s your pawn / Get ready now, ’cause pretty soon / She will be gone and you will be on your own,” he sings in the incredibly revealing track. The pair divorced in 1989.

‘Mystifies Me’ – Ronnie Wood

Enter player three. A spanner is thrown into the works of the famed love triangle when The Rolling Stones guitarist also penned tracks to Boyd. ‘Mystifies Me’ and ‘Breathe On Me’ from Wood’s early solo projects are both about the muse as they had an affair in the early 1970s.

Wood and Harrison ended up in “sort of a warped rock star wife swap” as the Stone had an affair with Boyd, while Harrison slept with his wife in return. To make things even more complicated, Wood’s wife, Krissie Findley, used to be Clapton’s girlfriend. Even with so much drama and so many dynamics at play, adoration for Boyd sits at the centre.

‘Old Love’ – Eric Clapton

The strangest thing about the messed up love triangle between Boyd, Harrison and Clapton is that all three stayed friends and seemed to remain fans or admirers of each other. When things finally came to blows as Clapton’s feelings for the muse became clear, the two musicians fought it out through a guitar duel rather than a fistfight, with onlookers saying, “The air was electric. Nobody dare say a word.”

In the end, after she’d left both of them, the pair seemed to come together to lick their wounds. When Clapton and Boyd divorced in 1989, he wrote to say he was working on an album with her “other ex-hubby” and had penned another track for her.

“I think it will be the best one on the album,” he said. “It’s called ‘Old Love,’ don’t be offended, it’s not about you being old, it’s about love getting old, and it’s great, well, you’ll see it when you hear it.”

However, Boyd wasn’t quite so flattered by this point. By the time she could fill a whole album of tracks about herself but had still just been largely mistreated by these artists without any way to publicly defend herself or speak on her side of the story, she’d had enough of the muse role. “The end of a relationship is a sad enough thing, but to then have Eric writing about it as well,” she said, “It makes me more sad, I think, because I can’t answer back.”