Let It Be

Paul McCartney has said “Let It Be” came out of a dream in which his mother, Mary McCartney — who died of cancer when Paul was fourteen — appeared to him during a genuinely rough stretch for the band and told him to let it be. “Mother Mary comes to me” is literal, not a religious line, though McCartney has said he's never minded people hearing it that way.

It was recorded in January 1969 and released in 1970, during the sessions that became the Beatles' final album and its accompanying documentary — by most accounts a tense, fractured period for the group. That's easy to forget listening to the finished track, one of the calmest, most gospel-inflected recordings the band ever made, built around Billy Preston's electric piano.

Harmonically this is about as approachable as a real song gets — C, G, Am, and F, the same handful of chords behind dozens of gospel and pop standards — so learning it also banks shapes you'll reuse everywhere else.

The chart marks the tempo at quarter-note = 74 with a soft-rock feel. Keep the left hand steady rather than pushing into the chorus; the lift in this song comes from the melody and the chords resolving underneath it, not from speeding up.