The Beatles — Let It Be

Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo, Gatefold, 1970

There was a time when Let It Be was never supposed to see the light of day. Neck deep in in-fighting, internal strife, and Yoko’s flowers, probably, The Beatles were done. Absolutely done.

“Let’s go back to our roots,” they said. “Let’s make a rock album again,” they said. “Let’s act like a middle-aged dad and struggle to recapture our glory years again, when we could just have fun and we played concerts and we weren’t the biggest band in the world,” they said.

That’s not how it works, though. You don’t get to go back to what you had in the same way.

And that’s where the story of The Beatles takes the most human turn. We grew up with the band playing the part of God — “bigger than Jesus,” naturally — and then near the end they nearly sputter to a close, out of gas and struggling for the final push. They mistakingly thought that the world could still accept where they had come from, that the world hadn’t moved along with them. That the themselves hadn’t changed the world in a way that the past couldn’t be rekindled.

Every band has tried this. Even Nirvana’s In Utero was a fight to go back to their pre-Nevermind sound — and that was only their third full length.

What’s more, each of us do this. We download a game and try to stay up all night playing it like we used to. We catch up with old friends and try to recapture the magic of our old haunts. We task nostalgia with staying relevant, when in fact it’s the one thing nostalgia can never get right.

There’s nothing wrong with that. We all can learn a lot by remembering the past is there as something we can marvel at, but never reproduce. We do better creating new things. High school is gone. Our first college apartment is gone. That first album is gone. All we have is Let It Be.

Funny enough, Let It Be was released — as we all know, it featured some Very Gigantic Songs like “Let It Be” and “Across the Universe” — but not before they went back into the studio and made a modern album. One that reflected their current status. Let It Be is always looked at as a rare flaw (though a very small flaw) in the Beatles catalog.

We can’t recapture the magic. Even if we were once the best in the world.