‘Let It Be’: How Paul McCartney defied The Beatles’ attitudes with one defining song

When everything started to cave in on The Beatles‘ empire, it wasn’t just that they were losing steam. Alongside the creative differences and frustrations, Paul McCartney was the only one who still seemed interested in keeping things afloat. Even George Harrison had grown disillusioned with being part of the Fab Four, and John Lennon—well, Lennon was already off on a different journey, with one foot barely still in the circle that made his name.

The reasons for such intense draining around this time are obvious and well-documented across decades, but for the purpose of context, it generally went something like this: while recording for The White Album, the ambition seemed to outweigh the enthusiasm, which was particularly tainted by Yoko Ono’s persistent presence in the studio. According to McCartney, although it was obvious why they felt uncomfortable with it, no one explicitly said anything about it, leading to a dense atmosphere that hindered productivity.

However, McCartney could only do so much on his own, and eventually, he, too, ran out of steam. That is, until one night, when he closed his eyes and drifted off into the parallel universe that grasps our souls in sleep, he had an unexpected visit from his mother, who had died some ten years prior. During their heartfelt rendezvous, his mother seemed to utter three simple words that made a taut time feel all the more manageable: “Let it be”.

While it seems obvious, then, that he would begin such a prophetic composition with the words, “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me…”, this was also the peacemaker that suddenly made everything feel doable, even though each member knew that the train stamped brightly with the unbearably effervescent signage ‘THE BEATLES’ was coming to its final destination.

“I immediately felt at ease, and loved and protected,” McCartney said.

Scapegoating Ono for the band’s problems during this time always feels particularly trite, especially as there were more deeply engrained issues that were tearing it all down. According to McCartney, the band had been growing more and more bitter since the death of Brian Epstein, with everything suddenly coming to an impasse in a way that felt stagnating but also quietly explosive. At this juncture, all the positivity they once had was drained, but ‘Let It Be’ served as a sudden lifeblood, even if it only benefited McCartney in the long run.

But these epiphanies—delivered by his mother or otherwise—weren’t just idle realisations about how wonderful things could be if you suddenly stopped entertaining stress. For McCartney, it was also a gateway to catharsis and a sudden ability to take it all on, knowing that there was an end in sight no matter how bad things felt. Sometimes, this meant addressing the more sinister corners of the mind, in whichever way they made themselves known.

As McCartney recalled in A Hard Day’s Write by Steve Turner, “I wrote it when all those business problems started to get me down. I really was passing through my ‘hour of darkness’ and writing the song was my way of exorcising the ghosts.” While many of McCartney’s sentiments in the song shine a light on the value of hope during trying times, it also enabled him to explore the pathway to his own untouched frustrations, with a defining song lathered by everything that formed the makeup of his being.

Perhaps what was even more telling about how ‘Let It Be’ became more about McCartney’s journey at the tether-end of The Beatles’ was that, although credited as a Lennon-McCartney song, Lennon felt no attachment to it at all. “It had nothing to do with The Beatles,” he later said, unknowingly pushing the disjointed band narrative more into its own sturdiness while spotlighting McCartney’s desire to hold onto any lasting positive when no one else had any.

As he sings in the song, “When the brokenhearted people living in the world agree / There will be an answer, let it be / For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see / There will be an answer, let it be.”

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