I've Got a Feeling


"I've Got a Feeling" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1970 album Let It Be. It was recorded on 30 January 1969 during the Beatles' rooftop concert. It is a combination of two unfinished songs: Paul McCartney's "I've Got a Feeling" and John Lennon's "Everybody Had a Hard Year". The song features Billy Preston on electric piano.
A studio take of the song, recorded about a week earlier, was released on the Anthology 3 compilation in 1996. The 2003 remix album Let It Be... Naked includes a version of the song that is a composite edit of the rooftop concert take used on Let It Be and a second attempt at the song from the same concert.

Composition

Lennon's song was a litany where every line started with the word "everybody". The song had been recorded twice before by Lennon, prior to the Let It Be sessions. The first occurred in early December 1968 at Lennon's Kenwood estate on a portable cassette tape. For this, the lyric was "Everyone had a hard year" instead of the later "Everybody". Later in December 1968, with the lyric changed to "everybody," Lennon was filmed performing the song in the back garden of Kenwood. This footage was used in the Yoko Ono art film Rape: Film No. 6, which was broadcast on Austrian National Television on 31 March 1969.
While McCartney's song was very optimistic, Lennon had actually endured a "hard year"—he divorced his first wife, Cynthia Lennon; his girlfriend Yoko Ono had a miscarriage; he was battling a heroin addiction; he was arrested for drug possession; he was estranged from his son Julian; and he had grown deeply unhappy in the Beatles.
In the film Let It Be, Lennon jokingly claimed he had written "Everybody Had a Hard Year" the night before.

Personnel