Picture this scenario: one day in the summer of 1968 you sit down and write an achingly heartfelt song inspired by the beauty of the Scottish Highlands and six months later you record a version whose stripped-down instrumentation only elevates the emotive sentiment of the song.
Four months later, the song is released but what you hear when the stylus drops on the acetate is radically different from the version that you remember.
Layered across the 3:30 running time of your composition is a prominent array of orchestral and choral overdubs. To be precise: eight violins, four violas, four cellos, three trumpets, three trombones, two guitars, and a 14-strong female choir.
For the writer of the song, Paul McCartney, the addition of such lavish orchestration and choral arrangements on his song came as an utter and unwelcome shock.
The first thing McCartney did was to write a blunt letter to the band’s business manager Allen Klein.
In his letter to Klein, McCartney demanded that many of the orchestral arrangements be lowered in volume and that the harp at the end be removed entirely.
McCartney had another instruction for Klein: “Don’t ever do it again,” he wrote. Then he called in the lawyers.
The details of McCartney’s response came to light in December 2024, when 300 pages of legal documents relating to The Beatles’ break-up came up for auction.
“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Denise Kelly of Dawson auctioneers told the BBC when the documents came under the auctioneer’s hammer on 8 December, 2024 – the 44th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.
McCartney’s letter to Klein set in motion a convoluted stream of legal wrangles that would finally result in the official end of The Beatles on 29 December 1974, four years after the band themselves had broken up on 10 April 1970.
But for all the depressing legal implications that it sparked, The Long And Winding Road remains one of Paul McCartney’s finest and most personal compositions.
55 years after the song was released as a single, the song occupies an illustrious place in McCartney’s peerless back catalogue.
It was mid-August 1968 when Paul McCartney and his new girlfriend and future wife Linda Eastman left his house in London’s St John’s Wood and drove 550 miles north to High Park Farm, near Campbelltown on the Kintyre peninsula in the southwest of Scotland.
McCartney had bought the farm two years earlier on 17 June 1966 after reportedly being advised to invest in property. Actress Jane Asher, his girlfriend at the time, helped him choose the property.
By 1968, it proved the ideal place for McCartney to find solace away from the arguments and dissolving relationships within The Beatles. The remoteness and beauty of High Park Farm also made it a perfect location to write.
McCartney wrote Blackbird during that time at the farm and it seems likely that he also wrote Her Majesty then. It was certainly there that he came up with The Long And Winding Road.
“I just sat down at my piano in Scotland, started playing and came up with that song, imagining it was going to be done by someone like Ray Charles,” McCartney told Mike Merritt of the Sunday Herald in 2003. “I have always found inspiration in the calm beauty of Scotland and again it proved the place where I found inspiration.”
In his 2010 book Fab: An Intimate Life Of Paul McCartney, writer Howard Sounes notes that the title The Long And Winding Road had its literal roots in the narrow B842 road on the Kintyre peninsula, “stretching up into the hills” of the remote Highland setting towards Campbeltown.
But the title also became a metaphor for the tensions that were threatening to pull The Beatles apart as well as the impending bittersweet end of McCartney’s relationship with the band.
McCartney was also expressing anguish over the direction of his personal life. “It's a sad song because it's all about the unattainable,” said McCartney in Barry Miles’ 1997 biography Many Years From Now. “The door you never quite reach. This is the road that you never get to the end of."
The Long And Winding Road is essentially a piano ballad. McCartney has described the song as “slightly jazzy” which would have certainly fitted the style of its imagined recipient Ray Charles.
Written in the key of E-flat major, the song incorporates elements of its relative minor, C minor. For all the syrupy lushness of the orchestration on the original Phil Spector mix, the ascending horns actually imbue the song with all the stately melancholy of a Northern brass band.
Interestingly, it has no chorus and, unusually for The Beatles, no harmonies. Loss and nostalgia resonate throughout the song, which is both heartfelt and heartwarming, yet there’s a directness to McCartney’s gentle vocal delivery and arrangement that veers clear of overt sentimentality.
Melodically it soars and falls with marked shifts of emotion, punctuated by dramatically accented stops, such as at 47 seconds in when McCartney sings “The wild and windy night…”
His vocals sound natural and unforced, almost vulnerable at times, and with graceful vibrato as he shifts effortlessly through his range.
McCartney never sent the song to Ray Charles, but he did envisage it as a song written for another artist.
When he returned to London from Scotland, he recorded a demo of the song, during one of the sessions for the ‘White Album’.
He then offered the song to Tom Jones on the condition that Jones release it as his next single. Jones reportedly later recalled that he turned it down as his record label was about to issue Without Love as a single.
McCartney then sent a demo to Cilla Black, who would eventually release it in 1972.
By the start of 1969, however, McCartney had decided to record the song with The Beatles.
On 7 January 1969, during the band’s filmed footage at Twickenham Studios for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary Let It Be, McCartney premiered the song to the band.
When The Beatles relocated to their own hastily-created Apple Studio in the basement of their Saville Row offices, they recorded several takes of the song, on 26 January and again on 31 January 1969. These sessions were captured in Peter Jackson’s acclaimed 2021 three-part documentary Get Back .
The line-up in the studio was McCartney on lead vocals and piano, George Harrison on guitar, John Lennon on six-string Fender Bass VI six-string bass guitar, Ringo Starr on drums and guest pianist Billy Preston on Fender Rhodes electric piano.
Instrumentally, there are some stellar performances in The Long And Winding Road: McCartney’s simple and emotive piano performance, Ringo’s effortlessly fluid ride and hi-hats, George Harrison’s wonderfully subtle Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar flourishes through a Leslie speaker.
But one performance that was allegedly far from impressive was John Lennon’s bass line, as pointed out by Ian MacDonald in his acclaimed 1994 book Revolution In The Head.
“It features some atrocious bass-playing by Lennon, prodding clumsily around as if uncertain of the harmonies and making many comical mistakes,” wrote MacDonald. “Lennon’s crude bass playing on The Long And Winding Road, though largely accidental, amounts to sabotage when presented as finished work.”
Despite such misgivings, MacDonald was awestruck by McCartney’s achievements on the song. “The Long and Winding Road is one of the most beautiful things McCartney ever wrote. Its words, too, are among his most poignant, particularly the reproachful lines of the brief four-bar middle section. A shame Lennon didn't listen more generously.”
Criticisms of Lennon’s playing on the song were highlighted by music critics and fans when the song was released as a single on 11 May 1970 and became The Beatles’ 20th and final No.1 single in the US Billboard Hot 100.
In reviews of the album Let It Be, released three days earlier than the single on 8 May 1970, many reviews criticised Spector’s use of orchestration. Rolling Stone’s critic John Mendelsohn was particularly damning of Spector, concluding: “He's rendered The Long And Winding Road ... virtually unlistenable with hideously cloying strings and a ridiculous choir”.
In the years and decades that followed Paul McCartney harboured a sense of disappointment over the mixing over some of the tracks on Let It Be and particularly The Long And Winding Road. A chance meeting in the early 2000s with the Let It Be director Michael Lindsey-Hogg sparked a discussion about releasing a remixed, stripped-down version of the original Let It Be album to accompany the film.
Before his death on 29 November 2001, George Harrison gave his approval for such a project and McCartney then received Ringo Starr’s and Yoko Ono’s agreement to release a remixed, stripped-down version of the album.
Apple’s Neil Aspinall then picked up the phone to call Abbey Road veteran engineer Allan Rouse, asking him to take a stab at remixing it.
On 17 November 2003, Let It Be… Naked was released. Of all the tracks on this remixed and reimagined album, The Long And Winding Road underwent the most profound transformation. Stripped of Spector’s schmaltzy strings, the raw purity of the song emerges as McCartney and the band always imagined it.
McCartney wasn’t the only one delighted with the remixed version of The Long And Winding Road. Ringo Starr too was elated.
“The Long And Winding Road blew me away without the strings,” Starr told Mike Merritt of the Sunday Herald in 2003. “There’s nothing wrong with Phil’s strings, this is just a different attitude to listening. But it’s been 30-odd years since I’ve heard it without all that and it just blew me away.”
In his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present, McCartney delves into the background and impact of The Long And Winding Road.
“One of the most fascinating aspects of this song is that it seems to resonate in very powerful ways,” he wrote. “For those who were there at the time, there seems to be a double association of terrific sadness and also a sense of hope.”
He went on to add that the song’s distinctive sound was due to him attempting to imitate other artists to “keep things fresh.”
“Often when I write a song, I do a bit of a disappearing act myself,” said McCartney. “For example, I imagine it having been recorded by somebody else – in this case Ray Charles.
“There’s always someone else you can invoke,” he continued. “You can put on a mask and a cloak as you’re writing something, and it takes away a lot of the anxiety. You discover as you get through it that it wasn’t a Ray Charles song anyway; it was yours. The road leads not to Campbeltown, but to somewhere you never expected.”
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