I've Got a Feeling

• 1. Introduction

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  "I've Got a Feeling" is a Beatles song that exists because two unfinished songs collided. Paul McCartney had one fragment; John Lennon had another. Neither was quite complete on its own. Together, they became a track on the 1970 album Let It Be, and the moment that preserved them forever took place on a rooftop in London on the 30th of January 1969.

  What were those two unfinished pieces? How did they fit together? And why did it take more than fifty years for one of the most recognizable voices in rock history to finally sing a duet with the other?

• 2. Two Songs, One Recording

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  McCartney's contribution carried the title of the finished song, while Lennon brought a piece he described as a litany. Every single line in Lennon's section began with the word "everybody". The two fragments ran alongside each other rather than in sequence. McCartney's verses and chorus occupied one layer; Lennon's litany wove through it simultaneously.

  Billy Preston, the American keyboardist who was invited into the Let It Be sessions, played Fender Rhodes piano on the track. His presence was part of a broader effort to ease the tension that had been building inside the band. George Harrison played lead guitar, Ringo Starr played drums, and both McCartney and Lennon sang lead vocals. The rooftop concert on the 30th of January 1969 was where the version used on Let It Be was captured.

• 3. Lennon's Earlier Attempts

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  Lennon had been working on his part of the song well before the Let It Be sessions began. In early December 1968, he recorded it at his Kenwood estate using a portable cassette tape. That early version carried a slightly different lyric: "Every had a hard year" rather than the "Everybody" that made it to the final recording.

  Later that same month, with the lyric corrected to "everybody," Lennon performed the song again. This time he was filmed in the back garden of Kenwood. That footage did not simply disappear into an archive. It was used in Yoko Ono's art film Rape: Film No. 6, which was broadcast on Austrian television on the 31st of March 1969. The song's journey from a cassette in a home garden to a broadcast art film happened within just a few months.

• 4. What the Archive Revealed

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  A studio take of the song, recorded approximately a week before the rooftop concert, was eventually released on the Anthology 3 compilation in 1996. It offered listeners a different look at how the track sounded before the open-air setting of the rooftop shaped the final version.

  The 2003 remix album Let It Be... Naked went further. Rather than using a single take, that album's version of the song is a composite edit. It draws on both the rooftop concert take that appeared on the original Let It Be and a second attempt at the song from the same concert day. Two performances from the same afternoon were stitched together into one.

• 5. A Virtual Duet Decades Later

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  Peter Jackson's Get Back documentary, which drew on footage from the original Let It Be filming sessions, made something newly possible. During its production, Lennon's vocal track was isolated from the recording. That isolated vocal became the basis for something McCartney had never been able to do in the decades since Lennon's death.

  On his 2022 Got Back tour, McCartney performed "I've Got a Feeling" live as a virtual duet. Lennon's isolated voice played through the speakers while McCartney sang his own part in real time. The pairing that had existed on tape since 1969 was finally experienced by concert audiences as something closer to a live performance.