Abbey Road

The Beatles

Apple, 1969

“it was a very happy record,” said producer George Martin, describing this album. “I guess it was happy because everybody thought it was going to be the last.” Indeed, Abbey Road — recorded in two months during the summer of 1969 — almost never got made at all. That January, the Beatles were on the verge of a breakup, exhausted and angry with one another after the disastrous sessions for the aborted Get Back LP, later salvaged as Let It Be [see No. 342]. Yet determined to go out with the same glory with which they had first entranced the world at the start of the decade, they reconvened at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios to make their most polished album: a collection of superb songs cut with an attention to refined detail, then segued together (especially on Side Two) with conceptual force. John Lennon veered from the stormy metal of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” to the exquisite vocal sunrise of “Because.”

Paul McCartney was saucy (“Oh! Darling”), silly (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”), and deliciously bitter (“You Never Give Me Your Money”). George Harrison proved his long-secret worth as a composer with “Something” and the folk-pop diamond “Here Comes the Sun,” written in his friend Eric Clapton’s garden after a grim round of business meetings. And Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison reputedly sang more three-part harmony here than on any other Beatles album. That warm feeling — a sense of an increasingly divided band coming together as friends — may be one reason Abbey Road has become the most beloved Beatles album of all time.