Beatles

At the start of 1970, Paul McCartney was still clinging to the hope that the Beatles could still work as a band. The “Get Back” project had been born precisely with the intention of recapturing the spirit of their early days: four musicians in the same room, few studio tricks, and a return to the most immediate dimension of simply playing together. What happened was practically the opposite. The sessions laid bare tensions that were by then hard to hide, endless arguments and an enthusiasm that came and went, while McCartney often found himself trying to hold together something that was already falling apart. The final reckoning for McCartney, though, didn't come during one of his many clashes with John Lennon or George Harrison. It came while listening to the final version of one of his own songs: “The Long And Winding Road”.

The road to sunset

As is well known, “The Long And Winding Road” is one of the key tracks on “Let It Be”. But by the time the album came out, on May 8, 1970, the Beatles had already effectively reached the end of the line. Paul McCartney had publicly announced his split from the band just weeks earlier, on April 10, but the record delivered to the world the final chapter in the Liverpool band's discography and, with it, one of its most painful elegies. “The Long And Winding Road”, destined to become the Beatles' twentieth and final number one on the Billboard Hot 100, seemed almost written to be the perfect soundtrack for a farewell. In truth, though, it was only upon hearing what Phil Spector had done to his song that McCartney fully understood just how far the band had slipped from his control.

The song's story, in fact, had begun two years earlier. McCartney wrote it in 1968, at a time when relations within the Beatles were becoming increasingly fraught. The inspiration came to him at his Scottish farm, near Campbeltown: the image of a long and winding road, set in the landscape and leading toward the sea, became the starting point for a poignant ballad built around a sense of distance, waiting, and the longing to find a way back home. A song conceived by Paul as a spare composition for piano and voice, with gentle support from John and Ringo.
An initial recording already dates back to the period of the “White Album”, but “The Long And Winding Road” returned to the spotlight precisely during the troubled “Get Back” sessions of January 1969.
“The Long And Winding Road” was approached in a deliberately stripped-down form. Two recordings, from January 26 and 31, were later considered for release. McCartney was on piano and vocals, John Lennon on bass, George Harrison on guitar, Ringo Starr on drums and Billy Preston on organ. A spare, unadorned performance, very close to the original spirit of “Get Back”.
The project, however, was shelved as relations among the four continued to deteriorate. When, the following year, it was decided to salvage those recordings to put together an album, John Lennon and George Harrison handed the material over to producer Phil Spector. And it's here that the story of “The Long And Winding Road” turned, for McCartney, into something far more serious than a mere aesthetic disagreement.

Spector's version

Spector chose the January 26 recording and subjected it to a radical transformation. Over the Beatles' bare-bones performance he layered a sweeping orchestration featuring 18 violins, four violas, three cellos, three trumpets, three trombones, two guitars and a 14-strong female choir. It was the exact opposite of what “Get Back” was supposed to represent: instead of a band captured almost live, a lush, sentimental and openly spectacular production.
McCartney hadn't been consulted. When he heard the result, he reacted with anger, demanding specific changes from Apple, including scaling back the orchestration and removing the harp at the end of the track.
He also tried to pressure manager Allen Klein and the other Beatles to have the song released as originally conceived, but it was already too late: “The Long And Winding Road” and the other songs from the “Get Back Sessions” were released with the new arrangements on “Let It Be”.

That was one of the moments when McCartney had to confront, in the most brutal way, a reality he had long tried to resist: the Beatles no longer made decisions about their own music together. The band that for years had built its records through a delicate collective balance had by then also become a tangle of managers, producers, lawyers and opposing alliances.
“The Long And Winding Road” thus ended up taking on an almost prophetic meaning. The lyrics hadn't been explicitly conceived as a farewell to the Beatles, but their mood of loneliness, distance and longing for reunion seemed to fit the band's dissolution perfectly. That long road leading endlessly back to an unreachable door could be read as a metaphor for a relationship McCartney still couldn't bring himself to let go of emotionally.

Paradoxes and claims

The timeline, too, helped turn the song into an epitaph. On April 10, 1970, McCartney made his departure from the band public; on May 8 “Let It Be” arrived, and a few days later “The Long And Winding Road”, backed with “For You Blue”, was released as a single in the United States. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, staying there for two weeks and becoming the Beatles' twentieth and final American chart-topper. The paradox was obvious: the song that best captured the traumatic end of the Fab Four turned into yet another massive hit in their history.

For McCartney, though, the matter wasn't settled in 1970. The version without Spector's orchestral overdubs remained, for decades, a kind of artistic vindication. In 1996 the January 26 recording appeared in a more stripped-down form on “Anthology 3”; in 2003, “Let It Be... Naked” instead opted for the January 31 take, free of Spector's orchestration and much closer to the song's original idea.
More than thirty years on, McCartney could finally listen to “The Long And Winding Road” without the production he had experienced as an imposition.

But the historical significance of the 1970 version remained indelible. The song had by then gone down in history as the unintentional document of the Beatles' end. Born as a melancholy reflection on distance and the longing to find one's way home, “The Long And Winding Road” ended up perfectly narrating the final stretch of the road for the most famous band in popular music. And it was precisely the transformation Spector imposed on it that made clear to McCartney something he could no longer ignore: the band he had desperately tried to hold together no longer existed.

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05/10/2026