George Harrison played tracks from his last album to family and friends in his private room at a Los Angeles hospital last Sunday, four days before he died.
His wife Olivia and son Dhani seem certain to release the CD as a tribuite to Harrison's courage in the face of the cancer that killed him at the age of 58.
It could repeat the success of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy album, which sold millions of copies amid the international outpouring of grief that followed Lennon's murder in New York in 1980.
Harrison had given the album the working title of Portrait Of A Leg End, a pun on his celebrity status and a reference to a squashing foot graphic used in the opening sequence of the Monthy Python television series.
Unlike his last song, "Horse To Water", recorded in Switzerland for a new Jools Holland CD and released with a poignant credit to RIP Ltd, the songs on his own CD do not allude to his illness.
One of the tracks, "Rising Sun", is an ambiguous reference to Harrison's interest in far-eastern religions and also to Dhani's emergence as a gifted guitarist.
Harrison was completing work on 25 unreleased tracks in his studio in Oxfordshire. Some allude to traumatic personal events, including the attempt on his life by an intruder who broke into his mansion in December 1999.
Jim Keltner, the world's most in-demand session drummer, flew from his home to California to add drums to the tracks.
"The CD is very close to finishing. There is a certain soulfoulness about George's music that doesn't need a lot once he has put that voice on," Keltner said.