Did The Beatles rip themselves off with ‘Let It Be’
When The Beatles first became famous, they were pressured to write more songs than any creative person would have considered possible. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were persistently pursuing greatness, working together in a bid to create hits that they liked and that the public at large would persistently hang on to. When we consider just how much the two of them were writing, should it really come as a surprise that some of their songs sounded alike?
‘Let It Be’ is one of the band’s biggest songs, to the point that when people begin playing the band’s biggest hits, this is one of the songs that will get the biggest reaction. It’s a moving and positive number which is laced with hope and feels like the musical equivalent of a warm blanket. That was very intentional, as Paul McCartney admitted he wrote the song because he was anxious and had a dream that his mother was comforting him.
“She was reassuring me, saying, ‘It’s going to be OK, just let it be.’ I felt so great. She gave me the positive words,” recalled McCartney, “I woke up and thought, ‘What was that? She said ‘Let It Be.’ That’s good.’ So I wrote the song ‘Let It Be’ out of positivity.”
That positivity resonates throughout the world for anyone who listens to the song. However, it would be remiss not to point out that the track sounds somewhat familiar to another Beatles song, where the protagonist is asked to take something sad and make it better. ‘Hey Jude’ is another one of The Beatles’ most popular songs, but there is no denying the fact that it and ‘Let It Be’ share some similarities. Beatles fans have noticed parallels in the song’s structure, overall theme and chord progression.
The more you listen to the two songs, the more you begin to pick up on these similarities. The chords start slow and build up, the songs are all about drawing positive situations out of negative ones, and they become incredibly repetitive towards the end. The “na na na na nahhhs” at the end of ‘Hey Jude’ paired with the repeated phrase ‘Let It Be’ are similar in what they manage to achieve sonically. They create a sense of unity and community, which is great to listen to, but they are very similar.
John Lennon wasn’t a huge fan of either of these tracks. He grew tired of hearing radio stations play The Beatles and only repeat the same five or six tracks. He heard ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Let It Be’ a lot more than other Beatles songs and got frustrated about this, given how many songs the band had in their back catalogue ready for radio stations to play.
He also felt as though Paul McCartney was no longer writing for The Beatles when he put ‘Let It Be’ together, and the song is him edging closer towards the end of the band. “[It’s] nothing to do with The Beatles,” he said when discussing ‘Let It Be’, “It could’ve been Wings. I don’t know what [Paul was] thinking when he writes ‘Let It Be’. I think it was inspired by Bridge Over Troubled Water. That’s my feeling, although I have nothing to go on. I know that he wanted to write a Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
