10 Albums That Were Released Completely By Surprise

For anyone on the inside of the Beatles' world in the late '60s, you knew things weren't going all that well. In an attempt to go back to their roots on the tentative Get Back project, the band wanted the entire thing shelved after a few failed sessions, electing to make a proper album and making Abbey Road their last hurrah as a creative unit. Though Let It Be wouldn't see the light of day until 1970, we got a special surprise when Paul McCartney gave us his first solo album before the last Beatles album came out.

Looking to get out of the tense sessions that the Beatles were up to at the time, what appears on this album is some of the more off the wall ideas that Paul was creating in secret from the rest of the band, along with a few songs that didn't make the cut for the Beatles sessions like Junk. Although Maybe I'm Amazed became one of the first major hits for an ex-Beatle, most people were focusing on the liner notes of the album more than the music.

Serving as the only bit of press that Macca did for the album, the inner sleeve included an interview with McCartney about what the future of the Beatles had in store, saying that he didn't think that he and John Lennon would write any more new music in the near future. For all of the good fragments that we got on this album, most fans walked away knowing that the world's most popular band was now officially dead.