Let It Be by The Beatles

About

Written by Paul McCartney and becoming one of The Beatles' most iconic and remembered ballads, “Let It Be” presents an uplifting and comforting message that reflects a desire for peace and acceptance in the face of life’s challenges. The track was released alongside The Beatles' twelfth and final studio album of the same name, released in 1970. Starting with a piano solo played by McCartney, the song was inspired by a dream in which he met his late mother, Mary. As he explained in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune: I think I was getting, like, a little bit over the top with the party fashion – getting pretty tired and pretty wasted. And I went to bed one night and had a kind of restless night. But I had a dream where my mother, who had been dead at that point for about 10 years, came to me in the dream and it was as if she could see that I was troubled. And she sort of said to me, she said, ‘Let it be.’ And I remember quite clearly her saying, ‘Let it be,’ and ‘It’s going to be OK. Don’t worry.’ You know, ‘Let it be.’ I woke up and I remembered the dream, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s a great idea.’ And I then sat down and wrote the song using the feeling from that dream and of my mum coming to me in the dream. Alternatively, the Beatles' road manager, Mal Evans, believed that the song’s origin was due to him. In Keith Badman’s 2000 book, The Beatles Off The Record, Evans would mention this other possible origin: Paul was meditating one day, they were writing all the time, and I came to him in a vision. I was just standing there, saying, ‘Let it be, let it be,’ and that’s where the song came from. This other context would make sense, since in the first rehearsals of the song like on the unnumbered rehearsal of The White Album or the songs’s Take 22, Paul sings “Brother Malcolm” instead of “Mother Mary”. Despite John Lennon’s dislike of the song and its interpretation as a “religious” song due to its mention of Mother Mary, the song would become a worldwide hit. The song topped around 10 charts in several countries, and managed to peak at #1 on the US Billboard chart.