Overview
"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, Paul 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". Main recording took place in January 1969 during the Get Back album project and featured a sparse arrangement of piano, bass, guitar, and percussion. However, the Get Back project soon stagnated and no album resulted, and so John Lennon and George Harrison lent the band's January 1969 recordings, including that of "The Long and Winding Road", to producer Phil Spector so that he would attempt assembling an album out of them. He added lavish orchestral and choral overdubs to the song.