Maybe that marks some sort of collective exhale - a people coming through a traumatizing time and needing peace and reassurance. It says something about the national mood in the first half of 1970 that these two songs captured the national imagination. Simon & Garfunkel’s “ Bridge Over Troubled Water” was explicitly inspired by Phil Spector, and it’s got the same sort of slow-building orchestral heft, the same sort of unadorned and unshowy lead vocal, and the same sort of lyrical message about helping each other through shitty times. “Let It Be” replaced another secular hymn at #1. That version is probably better than the Spector-remixed album version, but the one that first came out is now so deeply embedded in my brain that the stripped-down take sounds somehow wrong. Decades later, McCartney released something closer to the version he wanted on the album Let It Be… Naked. Spector added layers of bombast to the song, and those layers ultimately distracted from the fragility at its core.
Now: Phil Spector obviously knew how to put a song together, and it’s hard to fault Lennon for recruiting one of the all-time greatest pop producers to work on one of his band’s songs, even if that recruitment was in bad faith.
McCartney had sent a “Let It Be” demo to Atlantic, and Aretha Franklin’s version of the song came out before the Beatles’ did. And in any case, all this took so long that the Beatles’ “Let It Be” wasn’t even the first version of the song to come out. But manager Allen Klein, who had his own little mini-feud with McCartney, set the contracts up with Spector without telling McCartney. McCartney hated what Spector did to the song. Spector piled on orchestral arrangements and studio effects. Lennon had the idea to bring in Phil Spector - who’d come out of temporary retirement to produce Lennon’s “ Instant Karma!” - to remix the album version of “Let It Be.” (“Instant Karma!” peaked at #3 behind “Let It Be.” It’s a 7.) George Harrison was adding guitar-solo overdubs after the band had already broken up. The Beatles recorded the “Let It Be” master in January 1969, and it didn’t come out for more than a year. On the album, Lennon introduced it thus: “Now, we’d like to do ‘Hark, The Angels Come.'” Years later, Lennon said that “Let It Be” was all McCartney, that it was “nothing to do with the Beatles … I don’t know what he’s thinking when he writes ‘Let It Be.'” You’re never going to believe this, but John Lennon didn’t like “Let It Be.” He thought the hymnlike aspects of the song were stupid. It’s lovely.īut the simplest version of the song is not the one that we got. At its simplest form, “Let It Be” is a secular hymn that lets its religious overtones pull it upward. Billy Preston played churchy organ on the song, and there’s a gospel lilt to the way it flows.
They’d hear the name “Mother Mary” as a religious reference, and McCartney steered into that. McCartney knew, of course, that most of the people hearing the song wouldn’t know it was about his mother. McCartney’s vocal is plaintive and simple, and his central melody is an all-timer. On the face of it, “Let It Be” is just a shatteringly gorgeous song, an extended contented sigh about getting through a shitty life period and finding the acceptance that certain things are out of your hands. We can hear its evidence in the recording. The turbulent history of “Let It Be” is written right into the song.
And then they finished putting the album, retitled Let It Be, together. The band recorded those songs, but then they went off and made Abbey Road. But the rehearsals were hard on the band, and they ended up giving up the idea. The album that became Let It Be was originally supposed to be Get Back, an LP of songs that the band had rehearsed in-studio and then performed, for the first time, in front of a live audience. McCartney wrote “Let It Be” when the Beatles were working on their White Album, and it took a while to get the song out into the world.