“The Long and Winding Road” by The Beatles

"The Long and Winding Road" arrived on Let It Be in May 1970, a month after Paul McCartney announced the Beatles were through, and it plays like a eulogy nobody could agree on. McCartney wrote the piano ballad at his farm in Scotland in 1968, with the band's growing bitterness toward one another seeping into it, and they cut it plainly in January 1969: piano, bass, guitar, percussion, and not much else.

Then the tapes went to Phil Spector, who smothered the song in strings and choir. McCartney soured on the result, and when he went to the High Court to dissolve the Beatles' partnership, its treatment was on his list of grievances. Critics hated the syrup too, yet it became the group's final American number one. The bare-bones takes finally surfaced on Anthology 3 and Let It Be... Naked.

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