Hey Jude
Seven minutes, four of them just na-na-na, and somehow nobody has ever wanted it to end sooner.
Seven minutes, four of them just na-na-na, and somehow nobody has ever wanted it to end sooner.

Garfunkel's voice climbing a gospel staircase, the last verse arriving like the cavalry.

Withers bought a small piano, ran his fingers up the keys, and found the coal-town kinship he missed.
Pete Rock looped a Tom Scott saxophone line, and CL Smooth's eulogy for a lost friend still aches.

An Average White Band loop, Q-Tip and Phife trading lines, and a Queens rooftop that Linden Boulevard still remembers.

Starr sang it at dawn after ten takes, having first made them cut the line about thrown tomatoes.
Mills cut the piano at Criteria on the instrument heard on "Layla," and John Paul Jones arranged the strings.
A-Plus flipped Billy Cobham's Heather into a beat he made in high school, and Oakland never sounded calmer.

Cocker slowed a Beatles album track to gospel tempo, with Jimmy Page on guitar and Tommy Eyre's organ intro.

Gorham and Robertson's twin leads on a track the band nearly left off Jailbreak; Kentucky radio saved it.

An airsickness bag, a film producer's request, and a single cut live at a club over two Austin nights.

Hynde cut it weeks after Honeyman-Scott's death, with Rockpile's Bremner on guitar and a Sam Cooke chant behind her.
Townshend woke in a Soho doorway after drinking with two Sex Pistols, and Keith Moon's last album took the title.

Seven weeks at UK number one for a debut single, and a chorus that puts her friends before any suitor.

King wrote it during the Tapestry sessions; Taylor cut it with Joni Mitchell behind him for his only number one.

Released two days after Shakur's death, Daz Dillinger's loop of DeBarge's A Dream carrying a farewell to lost friends.

A round about snow that the band never once played together, its voices stacked from first takes in production.

Harmonica played by Morissette herself, Ballard's warm production, and a rare Jagged Little Pill song that is simply grateful.

Moretti woke to hear Casablancas inventing the melody in the bathroom, and it became the warmest song on Is This It.
An uncleared Police sample handed Sting the royalties; Faith Evans and 112 turned mourning into eleven weeks at number one.