“Free as a Bird” by The Beatles

"Free as a Bird" is the sound of the Beatles pulling off the impossible: a brand-new single, out on Apple in December 1995, a quarter century after the split. John Lennon had cut it alone as a home demo in 1977, and when Paul McCartney went to Yoko Ono looking for unreleased Lennon material the others could work on for the Anthology project, the tape came back to life. McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr built a studio recording around it, adding their own playing, voices and arrangement, with Harrison's Traveling Wilburys partner Jeff Lynne co-producing.

It's a strange, moving thing, a ghostly Lennon vocal with his three old bandmates closing ranks around it. Joe Pytka's video flies through the band's history from a bird's-eye view, packed with nods to old Beatles songs. It won a Grammy in 1997 and gave them a Top 40 hit in a fourth decade.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.