Let It Be (1970)
Let It Be is a 1970 beat music album by The Beatles.
Recorded mostly in early 1969 but released in May 1970, weeks after the breakup, the Beatles' final album carries the strain of a band coming apart. Paul McCartney had pitched the sessions as a return to basics: live takes, few overdubs, rock and roll as it was played in the room. Phil Spector later added strings and choir to some tracks, a choice that split the group. Out of the friction came the title hymn, the gospel roll of Let It Be, the rooftop farewell of Get Back, and Across the Universe. A ragged, human goodbye.
Quick answers
What is Let It Be about?
Recorded mostly in early 1969 but released in May 1970, weeks after the breakup, the Beatles' final album carries the strain of a band coming apart. Paul McCartney had pitched the sessions as a return to basics: live takes, few overdubs, rock and roll as it was played in the room. Phil Spector later added strings and choir to some tracks, a choice that split the group. Out of the friction came the title hymn, the gospel roll of Let It Be, the rooftop farewell of Get Back, and Across the Universe. A ragged, human goodbye.
When was Let It Be released?
Let It Be was released in 1970.
Who made Let It Be?
Let It Be is by The Beatles.
Similar albums
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A few thoughts on Let It Be
For the fuller story behind these sessions, Peter Jackson's documentary The Beatles: Get Back restores the rooftop concert and the daily grind of writing in real time. McCartney's own Let It Be... Naked strips Spector's overdubs back toward the bare-room album he first imagined. Anyone wanting a warmer send-off should reach for Abbey Road, recorded after but released before.
Where to find more Beatles, on record and on screen
Let It Be captured a band already coming apart, and Peter Jackson's Get Back revisits those very January sessions in exhausting, tender detail, footage from the same rooftop and the same arguments. Go further back to Revolver, With The Beatles, and Beatles for Sale to hear the group before the strain, four Liverpool kids still finding out how good they could be together.
Landmark rock albums that carry the Beatles' fingerprints
Let It Be closed out the Beatles with strings and gospel and a rooftop farewell, and the decade after kept chasing that same scale. Pink Floyd's Meddle, Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, Queen's A Night at the Opera, and the Eagles' Hotel California all built on the same widescreen ambition, and Oasis wore the debt openly, borrowing Beatles harmonies wholesale for Morning Glory two decades later.