The Beatles - Let It Be (Super Deluxe) (2021) Hi Res

The last studio album that The Beatles released, 1970’s Let It Be, will be reissued in October as a belated 50th anniversary edition.

Recorded in early 1969, and documented in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be film, one single from these sessions (‘Get Back’ b/w ‘Don’t Let Me Down’) emerged in April 1969 and attempts by Engineer Glyn Johns to knock the album (then called Get Back) into some kind of shape were in vain. His mix May 1969 mix was rejected and the tapes were mothballed (a second Johns mix was rejected again in January 1970).

The retitled Let It Be album was eventually issued in May 1970 after Phil Spector was given the task of creating an album from the many hours of tapes. By that point, The Beatles had already recorded and released Abbey Road, their final studio outing.

Paul McCartney was famously unhappy with Spector’s fiddling with his songs (‘The Long and Winding Road’, in particular), but in typically frank style, John Lennon defended Spector in his 1970s interview with Rolling Stone, saying “He was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit – and with a lousy feeling to it – ever”.