The Beatles
The Long and Winding Road

You are twelve years old and your dad, born in '58, lets you listen to a song. You're not top of the class in English and certainly at that age you don't have any profound cultural background. So you let yourself listen and what happens is that you're struck.

"The long and winding road", it starts like this, with the title in the first verse of what I consider, after years, the most beautiful melody ever recorded. Because those words are not just words, but they are already elements of one of the most iconic introductions in pop music.

Sure, at that age you don't know the story behind such a piece, you probably don't even realize the cultural importance brought by the band that wrote it. Yet, you let yourself be involved by a sound that knows how to cradle you, wrap you in a veil of relentless sweetness from which, somehow, a knot of melancholy leaks out.

Then, the years pass, and you discover that The Long and Winding Road is the last single by the Beatles, their artistic testament, or rather, the artistic testament of Paul McCartney, considering that it was him who wrote the piece. You discover that, with tensions already among the band members and with Paul being out of town, the others decided to record his song, on the album Let It Be, hiring Phil Spector as the arranger. The official version, the one I knew, is therefore actually a piece quite different from how its author, Paul, would have wanted it. From a piano-voice piece, devoid of any excessive decoration, it became a song stuffed with strings and orchestra, according to the "wall of sound" technique adopted by Spector. Needless to say, Paul was not happy, but this was just the last straw that broke the unsustainable camel's back. Additionally, in the piece, John Lennon doesn't seem too committed to playing the bass, an instrument he used sporadically, making several technical errors.

Personally, however, the final result, the one recorded on the album, the one I first heard and that left me moved, satisfies me more than any other version, released only later, that I have heard. Too pompous, some will say. Too excessive, others will say. But I find that the orchestra accompanying the melody written by Paul adds something extra, a kind of nostalgic value, but at the same time the perfect feeling of the end of a journey, of a film, of an epic that started about a decade earlier and that wants to leave it to posterity to write another story, another course, a different path that will bring us to our present days.