The Long and Winding Road

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The featured article for Tuesday, 29 September 2026, is The Long and Winding Road.

"The Long and Winding Road" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1970 album Let It Be. A piano ballad, Paul McCartney composed it at his Scottish farm in 1968, driven by the Beatles' increasing bitterness towards each other. As he did so, he "imagined it was going to be done by someone like Ray Charles". Main recording took place in January 1969 during the Get Back album project (later renamed Let It Be) and featured a sparse arrangement of piano, bass, guitar, and percussion. However, the Get Back project soon stagnated and no album resulted, and so John Lennon and George Harrison lent the band's January recordings, including that of "The Long and Winding Road", to producer Phil Spector so that he would try assembling an album out of them. He added lavish orchestral and choral overdubs to the song.

McCartney, along with the rest of the band, sent Spector a telegram sanctioning his arrangements. However, by late April, he had grown to dislike them. The Beatles' producer George Martin and their engineer during the Get Back sessions, Glyn Johns, also disapproved of them. McCartney firmly asked the band's manager Allen Klein to curtail Spector's production, which he did not. When McCartney made his case in the English High Court for the dissolution of the Beatles' legal partnership, he cited the treatment of "The Long and Winding Road" as one of six reasons justifying the split. In his defence, Spector argued that the bass playing on the song, done by Lennon, was poor and had to be covered, and that McCartney had been consulted before its release.

"The Long and Winding Road" was released as part of Let It Be in May 1970, a month after McCartney announced the band's breakup. Critics reacted unfavourably to Let It Be and condemned Spector's overdubs on the song, which reviewer John Mendelsohn called "oppressive mush". Nonetheless, it reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in June 1970, their second number one of the year and the group's overall twentieth and final number one hit on that chart. Retrospective reviews have taken more kindly to the song; Ian MacDonald, for instance, thought it was "one of the most beautiful things McCartney ever wrote". Brian Wilson considered it his favourite Beatles song. The original non-overdubbed recording of "The Long and Winding Road" was later released on Anthology 3, and another January 1969 take features on Let It Be... Naked (2003), an album partly born of McCartney's distaste for the song's final version. "The Long and Winding Road" has been covered by Cilla Black, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles, among many others.

This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:10 UTC on Tuesday, 29 September 2026.

For the full current version of the article, see The Long and Winding Road on Wikipedia.

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