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, it was written by Paul McCartney and credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership. McCartney composed it at his Scotland 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", according to his recollection. The main recording of the song took place in January 1969 and featured a sparse arrangement of piano, bass, guitar, and percussion. With the Let It Be album project disrupted, John Lennon and George Harrison lent the band's January 1969 recordings, including that of "The Long and Winding Road", to producer Phil Spector in hopes that an album could materialize. He added 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 prior to its release.

"The Long and Winding Road" was released as part of Let It Be on 8 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, "The Long and Winding Road" became the group's twentieth and final number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States. 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 others.