LET IT BE

THE SONGS

Two Of Us

Linda McCartney: It’s about us. We just pulled off in a wood somewhere and parked the car. I went off walking, while Paul sat in the car and started writing. He also mentions the postcards because we used to send a lot of postcards to each other. Paul McCartney: We’d park up and go into the woods and fields. I’ve got photos that Linda took of me sitting on the car with my guitar, doing that song. So it was that idea of two of us going nowhere.

It was basically about me and Linda. But when I sang it with John it becomes about me and John. I like that. I love that reinterpretation that songs do. It’s magical.

Dig A Pony

John Lennon: I was just having fun with words. It was literally a nonsense song. You just take words and you stick them together, and you see if they have any meaning.

Across The Universe

John Lennon: It was a lousy track of a great song, and I was so disappointed by it. The guitars are out of tune, and I’m singing out of tune because I’m psychologically destroyed, and nobody’s supporting me or helping me with it. So the song was never done properly.

I Me Mine

George Harrison: It’s a very strange song which I wrote the night before it was in the filmed. At this time we were at Twickenham, and I wrote this song. It took five minutes just from an idea I had. I went into the studio and sang it to Ringo, and they happened to film it. And that film sequence was quite nice, you see, so they wanted to keep that sequence in the film, but I hadn’t really recorded it in Apple with the rest of the songs. So we had to go in the studio and re-record it.

Dig It

No comment. Being a heavily edited version of an impromptu jam, no one connected with Let It Be has ever gone on record to explain the origins of this brief track.

Let It Be

Paul McCartney: I had a dream I saw my mum, who’d been dead ten years or so. And it was so great to see her. Because that’s a wonderful thing about dreams: you actually are reunited with that person for a second; there they are and you appear to both be physically together again. It was so wonderful for me, and she was very reassuring. In the dream she said: “It’ll be all right.” I’m not sure if she used the words ‘Let it be’, but that was the gist of her advice. It was: ‘Don’t worry too much, it will turn out okay.’ It was such a sweet dream, I woke up thinking: “Oh, it was really great to visit with her again.” I felt very blessed to have that dream. So that got me writing the song Let It Be.

Maggie Mae

Being merely a raucous rendition of an old folk song, lasting just 40 seconds on the album, it’s hardly surprising that no one involved with the album has ever commented publicly about it.

I’ve Got A Feeling

This shotgun wedding of two unfinished song fragments (I’ve Got A Feeling by McCartney and Everybody Had A Hard Year by Lennon) is very likely the last genuine collaboration between the two. Even so, neither of them has spoken about it.

One After 909

John Lennon: That was something I wrote when I was about seventeen. I lived at nine Newcastle Road. I was born on the ninth of October. It’s just a number that follows me around, but, numerologically, apparently I’m a number six or a three or something, but it’s all part of nine. Paul McCartney: It was a number we didn’t used to do much, but it was one that we always liked doing, and we rediscovered it.

The Long And Winding Road

Paul McCartney: It’s all about the unattainable; the door you never quite reach. This is the road that you never get to the end of.

For You Blue

George Harrison: It’s a simple twelve-bar song following all the normal principles, except it’s happy-go-lucky!

Get Back

Paul McCartney: There were a couple of verses to Get Back which were actually not racist at all – they were anti-racist. There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living sixteen to a room or whatever. So in one of the verses of Get Back, which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the out-takes has something about ‘too many Pakistanis living in a council flat’. That’s the line. Which to me was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis… If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. I mean, all our favourite people were always black.