10 Greatest Unplugged Rock Songs
5. Blackbird - The Beatles
The beauty of the acoustic rocker is the fact that it's all about the song. Even if you have a bit of drums here and there, nothing is distracting from the singer and the guitar bringing all of the emotion they can muster to the table. And this...this is about as unplugged as they come.
Outside of a few bird sounds and a metronome, Blackbird is nothing but Paul McCartney sitting with a guitar, going through different chords that would make some intermediate guitarists cramp up.
Since the last thing that fans remember Paul playing guitar on was Yesterday, this is a great showcase for how much he grew as a player, bringing with him different ideas after having worked with Donavon in India before the White Album.
Along with the amazing performance, this is actually a fairly poignant song considering the time of its release. Though some people may have already picked up on it, Macca used the Blackbird analogy to refer to the black community that was going through the Civil Rights Movement in the States around the same time.
With no real way to reach out, he wrote this to make sure that his friends had hope fighting for their rights. And with all that's been going down in the world recently, it pays to have songs like this as a light in the darkness.