“The Fool On The Hill” by The Beatles

"The Fool on the Hill" belongs to the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, released in 1967 as both an EP and an album, and it's Paul McCartney's through and through: he wrote it and sang it, even if the credit reads Lennon–McCartney. It's a portrait of a loner everybody writes off as simple, who turns out to see further than the lot of them. McCartney has pointed to the Fool, a Dutch design collective named for the tarot card, as a spark, with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi possibly in the mix too.

For the Magical Mystery Tour film he shot his segment on his own, near Nice, with a professional cameraman and without telling the other three. A solo demo and an outtake later surfaced on Anthology 2 in 1996, and by the end of the '70s it had become one of his most-covered ballads.

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