The album was recorded in a more collegial atmosphere than the Get Back / Let It Be sessions earlier in the year, but there were still significant confrontations within the band, particularly over Paul McCartney's song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", and John Lennon did not perform on several tracks.

[12] Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, sharing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions.

The warmth of solid-state recording also afforded their music with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that distinguished Abbey Road from the rest of their corpus, providing listeners with an abiding sense that the Beatles' final long-player was markedly different.

[31] After the lyrics were refined during the Let It Be sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road.

[35] Lennon contributed piano to the recording and while most of the part was removed, traces of it remain in the final cut, notably on the middle eight, before Harrison's guitar solo.

It was inspired by a trip with his family to Sardinia aboard Peter Sellers's yacht after Starr left the band for two weeks during the sessions for the White Album.

[nb 3] Lennon used Harrison's Moog synthesiser with a white noise setting to create a "wind" effect that was overdubbed on the second half of the track.

Martin provided an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesiser part on 19 August, immediately before the final mix.

It has been featured several times on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, having been chosen by Sandie Shaw, Jerry Springer, Boris Johnson and Elaine Paige.

'"[73] Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central.

It was originally included in a rough mix of the side two medley (and officially available in this form for the first time on the album's 3CD Super Deluxe edition box set), appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam".

[74] Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label,[75] making it a hidden track.

[78] Three days after the session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Harrison recorded solo demos of "All Things Must Pass" (which became the title track of his 1970 triple album), "Something" and "Old Brown Shoe".

[82] The original backing track to "Something", featuring a piano-led coda,[32] and "You Never Give Me Your Money", which leads into a fast rock-n-roll jam session,[65] have appeared on bootlegs.

[85] The front cover was a photograph of the group walking on a zebra crossing, based on ideas that McCartney sketched,[86][nb 4] and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios on Abbey Road.

[88] A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio.

[nb 5] In 2004, news sources published a claim made by retired American salesman Paul Cole that he was the man standing on the pavement to the right of the picture.

[92] While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year,[93] McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August.

[86] On 20 September, six days before Abbey Road was released, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and business manager Allen Klein (Harrison was not present) that he "wanted a divorce"[94] from the group.

[107] While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special".

'"[111] Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ...

"[114] While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles.

Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine.

[127] Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among the Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s".

[122] Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous".

Pepper's "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt.

"[116] Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two.

[139][140] The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Road's commercial success in the US.

[143][144] On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street.

[156] Furthur, a jam band including former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, played the entire Abbey Road album during its Spring Tour 2011.