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"The Long and Winding Road" is a pop ballad written by Paul McCartney that originally appeared on The Beatles' album Let It Be. It became The Beatles' last Number 1 song in the United States on June 13, 1970. more...

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While the released version of the song was very successful, the post-production modifications to the song by producer Phil Spector angered McCartney to the point that when he made his case in court for breaking up The Beatles as a legal entity, he cited the treatment of "The Long and Winding Road" as one of six reasons for doing so.

Innocent inspiration

McCartney originally wrote the song at his farm in Scotland, inspired by the growing tension between The Beatles at the time. McCartney said later: "I just sat down at my piano in Scotland, started playing and came up with that song, imagining it was going to be done by someone like Ray Charles. I have always found inspiration in the calm beauty of Scotland and again it proved the place where I found inspiration."

Although McCartney was the sole writer of the song, like all Beatles songs written by him or John Lennon, it would be credited to "Lennon/McCartney" by long-standing contractual agreement.

McCartney recorded a quick demo version of the song, with Beatles engineer Alan Brown assisting, sometime in September of 1968, during the recording sessions for The White Album.

The song takes the form of a piano-based ballad, with an unconventional structure and some of the most inventive and sophisticated chord changes heard in The Beatles' catalogue. The song's home key is in E-flat, yet the song constantly attempts to upstage it with its relative minor, the key of C.

Lyrically, the song is a somewhat ambiguous evocation of an as-yet unrequited, though apparently inevitable, love. The "long and winding road" of the song is sometimes claimed to have been inspired by the B842, a thirty-one mile (50 km) winding road in Scotland, running along the east coast of Kintyre into Campbeltown, and part of the eighty-two mile (133 km) drive from Lochgilphead. In an interview in 1994, McCartney described the lyric more obliquely: "It's rather a sad song. I like writing sad songs, it's a good bag to get into because you can actually acknowledge some deeper feelings of your own and put them in it. It's a good vehicle, it saves having to go to a psychiatrist … It's a sad song because it's all about the unattainable; the door you never quite reach. This is the road that you never get to the end of."

The song structure is equally sophisticated: while the opening theme is repeated throughout, the song lacks a traditional chorus, and the melody and lyrics are considerably ambiguous about the opening stanza's position in the song; it is unclear whether the song has just begun, is in the verse, or even is in the bridge. This ambiguity has been a characteristic of other Beatles songs, such as "She Loves You."

Read more at Wikipedia.org