Artist: The Beatles · Album: Let It Be · Year: 1970 · Label: Apple · Rank: 64 / 500
Let It Be is a complicated record: part breakup document, part accidental classic. The Beatles are fracturing, trying to “return to basics,” and instead capturing a portrait of a band who can’t help making magic even when communication is collapsing.
The Sessions: Tension and Sparks
The film shows the bickering; the album captures the residue of brilliance. “Get Back,” “Two of Us,” “Dig a Pony”—loose, playful, searching. “Across the Universe” is dreamy transcendence. “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road” are Paul at his cathedral-sized emotional peak.
Phil Spector’s Wall of Strings
Spector’s lush overdubs angered Paul but gave the album its haunted, elegiac feel. It’s not “raw,” but it’s gorgeous in its own baroque way.
Legacy
The band might have been falling apart, but the songs endure. Let It Be remains a strange, beautiful coda to the most important rock career of all time.