One Session, Three Albums

The premise: get back to where they once belonged

In January 1969 the Beatles set out to make an album that would reverse everything their previous three years had been about. No orchestras, no tape tricks, no stacked overdubs — a band in a room, playing songs to tape the way they had at EMI in 1963, filmed while they did it. The working title said it plainly: Get Back. The sessions ran at Twickenham Film Studios and then at the Beatles’ own Apple Studios at 3 Savile Row, with George Martin producing, Glyn Johns engineering, and a film crew rolling throughout — culminating in the 30 January rooftop performance.¹

That one month of tape became three distinct albums. The band rejected the first. The second broke the premise that created it. The third tried, three decades later, to restore that premise with modern tools. Understanding which is which — and which songs appear on each — is the single most tangled question in the Beatles’ release history, and it is the question we untangle here.

Album one: the Get Back that wasn’t (1969)

When the sessions ended, Glyn Johns took the tapes to Olympic Sound Studios — his home ground, and the site of his most notable work with the Rolling Stones — and mixed the album the way he mixed everything: fast, live-sounding, warts left in. His first Get Back compile was assembled in May 1969. It honoured the original premise completely: studio chatter, false starts and loose ends stayed in, and the running order and song selection differed from anything later released. A second compile followed on 5 January 1970, swapping Teddy Boy out and bringing in I Me Mine and Across the Universe to align the album with the forthcoming film. The Beatles rejected both.¹

“His Olympic mixes for ‘Get Back’ were never officially released, and the album was to see more changes a few months later without his input.”

That sentence was true for 52 years, and it is why fans came to speak of “the Get Back album” as a kind of phantom — the record the Beatles intended to make, circulating only as a bootleg. It stopped being true on 15 October 2021, when the Let It Be Special Edition released Johns’s complete 14-track 1969 compile officially for the first time (CD4/LP4 of the Super Deluxe box). The 1970 second compile remains unreleased as a complete album, though two of its Johns mixes — Across the Universe and I Me Mine — appear on the box’s companion EP.³

Album two: Spector’s Let It Be (1970)

By the time the project resurfaced, the Beatles were breaking up. In March 1970 the American producer Phil Spector was brought in to finish the album without the band’s collective involvement, and what emerged on 8 May 1970 — retitled Let It Be (Apple/Parlophone PCS 7096) — was a different proposition from the raw record Johns had compiled. Spector added his signature scale: orchestral and choral overdubs on The Long and Winding Road, Across the Universe and I Me Mine, heavy remixing elsewhere, and editorial sleight of hand throughout.¹

The title track of the abandoned album shows how far the finished record sat from the session reality. The Get Back single (April 1969) and the Let It Be LP closer derive from different takes recorded on different days — the single from 28 January 1969, the LP version from the 27 January take that opens with John’s “Sweet Loretta Fart” parody introduction. Spector then crossfaded the rooftop “Thanks Mo…” and “…hope we passed the audition” ad-libs onto the close of his studio mix — in Mark Lewisohn’s words, “implying that the song was a rooftop recording”. It wasn’t.¹

A heavily edited version of the session footage became the 1970 Let It Be film; Peter Jackson’s 2021 Disney+ documentary series The Beatles: Get Back later drew on the same footage archive at far greater length, which is how a new generation met these sessions — and why the “Get Back vs Let It Be” question now gets asked more than ever.

Album three: Let It Be… Naked (2003)

Paul McCartney never made peace with the Spector treatment. Let It Be… Naked, released 17 November 2003 (Apple), was his initiative: strip the orchestrations, drop the chatter, and return the songs to the stripped-down, live-to-tape aesthetic the sessions were built on. It shares Glyn Johns’s premise, but it is not his album — Naked is a modern remix by the Abbey Road team of Allan Rouse and Paul Hicks, built from the session tapes with 2003 tools, not a reissue of the 1969 Olympic mixes.³

Nor is it simply “Let It Be without Spector”. The song selection is modified: Dig It and Maggie Mae are dropped, Don’t Let Me Down — the 1969 B-side, absent from the 1970 LP — is restored, and the running order is new. Three records, three tracklists.

Which songs are on which album

The eight songs common to all three releases still differ between them — by take, by mix, or both. Across the Universe and I Me Mine joined the project at Johns’s second (1970) compile, after the 1969 Get Back LP was assembled; Teddy Boy travelled the opposite way, dropped from the second compile and first officially released on McCartney’s solo debut.¹

So what do fans mean by “the Get Back album”?

They mean the 1969 Glyn Johns compile — the album the Beatles set out to make, mixed at Olympic by the engineer who ran the sessions, rejected by the band, and finally released on the 2021 Let It Be Special Edition. If you want to hear the January 1969 project as originally intended, that disc is the answer. If you want the record history actually delivered in 1970, it’s Spector’s Let It Be. And if you want the songs stripped back with the polish of modern mixing, it’s Naked. One session; three albums; and after half a century, all three finally official.

Per-song detail — takes, mixes, equipment, and session dates for every track above — lives on the individual song pages linked in the table, each cited to the primary-source canon.

Sources

1. Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988) — session-date entries for January 1969, 5 January 1970 and 26 March 1970; page-level citations on the linked song pages.
2. Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums (Houston: Curvebender Publishing, 2006), 327. Published 2006; the quoted “never officially released” predates the 2021 Special Edition.
3. Official release documentation: Let It Be… Naked (Apple, 17 November 2003) and Let It Be Special Edition Super Deluxe (Apple/UMe, 15 October 2021) liner notes. Post-1988/2006 releases sit outside the Lewisohn / Ryan-Kehew canon per this site’s editorial standards.