The Long and Winding Road 

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McCartney originally wrote the song at his farm in Scotland, and was inspired by the growing tension among the Beatles.^[3] McCartney said later:

“

I just sat down at my piano in Scotland, started playing and came up with that song, imagining it was going to be done by someone like Ray Charles. "I have always found inspiration in the calm beauty of Scotland and again it proved the place where I found inspiration."[3]

”

McCartney recorded a demo version of the song, with Beatles' engineer Alan Brown assisting, in September 1968, during the recording sessions for The Beatles.^[4]

The song takes the form of a piano-based ballad, with conventional chord changes. The song's home key is in E-flat major but also uses relative minor; the key of C minor.^[5] Lyrically, it is a sad and melancholic song, with an evocation of an as-yet unrequited, though apparently inevitable, love.

The "long and winding road" of the song was claimed to have been inspired by the B842, a thirty-one mile (50 km) winding road in Scotland, running along the east coast of Kintyre into Campbeltown, and part of the eighty-two mile (133 km) drive from Lochgilphead.^[6] In an interview in 1994, McCartney described the lyric more obliquely:

“

It's rather a sad song. I like writing sad songs, it's a good bag to get into because you can actually acknowledge some deeper feelings of your own and put them in it. It's a good vehicle, it saves having to go to a psychiatrist.[7]

”

The opening theme is repeated throughout, the song lacks a traditional chorus, and the melody and lyrics are ambiguous about the opening stanza's position in the song; it is unclear whether the song has just begun, is in the verse, or is in the bridge.^[5]