"The Long and Winding Road"

 

From Anthony Esolen at Word and Song: 

 There’s a story indeed about fate, the fates, and this song which I’ll share in a moment. But let’s look first at what was going on when Paul sat down at his piano one day in 1968 to write a song. The Beatles were at the top in popular music. That was the year that “Hey Jude” reached number one on the Billboard charts and stayed there for nine weeks. Paul had purchased a farm in Scotland two years earlier, from where he could look out onto (what else?) a long and winding road leading toward the Highlands. He’d had an idea in mind for the song for a couple of years. By 1968 the Beatles were squabbling, and despite their huge success — perhaps because of it — were nearing the end of their association. Paul sat down at the piano to write a sad song. And it’s a feature of the tune that there is and was no particular event that inspired it, other than the view and perhaps the bluesy style of Ray Charles. But as Paul later noted, the song was really about the sadness of aspiring to something that is always beyond your reach. He left “The Long and Winding Road” purposely ambiguous, so that listeners could experience it in their own way, feel the sadness in the music, and perhaps let go of a little bit of their own unspoken sorrow by listening. It’s a sad song that expresses a yearning for something apparently unattainable or unresolvable .. and yet there is hope in the song, the hope of going back and trying again. Just as the lyrics of the song never resolve a particular sadness, the structure of both the tune and the lyric winds around so that the beginning and ending are blurred and at the end you find yourself right where you began. This wasn’t an accidental outcome. It was a superbly executed composition, wistful and moving. The tune itself “leads” the listener back to the starting place. Now here is where the fates and fate and pressures from within and without enter into what happened to the song, which was, by the way, entirely the product of Paul McCartney’s genius, despite the legal necessity of his sharing the credit for it with John Lennon. Paul originally had in mind writing a song in the style of Ray Charles, and recording it in a paired down way, with piano accompaniment, guitars, and maybe a few other instruments. The group recorded a demo of it in January of 1969, and later Paul offered the song to British singer Tom Jones, who was a high-charting singer at that time. Jones liked the song, but his recording company was about to release a single he had just recorded, and they didn’t want him competing against himself with a second song. (Read more.)

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