10 Rock Albums Made Out Of Obligation

In a perfect world, Let It Be was probably never going to be the Beatles' final album. Though the idea of getting the band back to their roots after the wild experimentation of the White Album may have felt like it had potential, the band's constant bickering and inability to get their creative ideas out led to them shelving most of the sessions to work on Abbey Road instead, giving fans the sendoff that they had hoped for. That wasn't what the label had in mind though, and when they needed one more album, Phil Spector was called in to work his magic.

Even though this is home to some Fab classics like Across the Universe and the title track, some of the band was not all that happy to hear these songs come out, with Paul McCartney getting especially pissed off that Spector had added his trademark Wall of Sound to songs like the Long and Winding Road. While some of Spector's ideas may have been a bit scattered on this project, they do make you feel like a fly on the wall at the sessions, keeping the spontaneity of the famous rooftop performance of Get Back and adding in different odds and ends in between the songs like John Lennon doing funny voices before going into Two of Us and Let It Be.

When you look at the track listing of this records though, you start to understand why the band would have rather kept this on the shelf, with some of the songs only being a few seconds of studio banter to pad out the runtime before going right into the next song. There was no chance of getting all four Beatles in a room after this album came out, but it's a testament to them as musicians that something at half capacity still sounds this good.