hideously cloying strings and a ridiculous choir that serve only to accentuate the listlessness of Paul's vocal and the song's potential for further mutilation at the hands of the countless schlock-mongers who will undoubtedly trip all over one another in their haste to cover it." Mendelsohn said that while the song was a "slightly lesser chapter in the ongoing story of McCartney as facile romanticist", "it might have eventually begun to grow on one as unassumingly charming" without Spector's "oppressive mush". In 1973, musicologist and critic Wilfrid Mellers wrote: "The music has a tremendous expectancy … Whether or no Paul approved of the plush scoring of 'The Long and Winding Road', it works not because it guys the feeling but because the feeling has integrity." MacDonald said: "With its heart-breaking suspensions and yearning backward glances from the sad wisdom of the major key to the lost loves and illusions of the minor, 'The Long and Winding Road' is one of the most beautiful things McCartney ever wrote. Its words, too, are among his most poignant, particularly the reproachful lines of the brief four-bar middle section. A shame Lennon didn't listen more generously." According to Williams, writing in his book Phil Spector: Out of His Head, Spector's mistake was in "taking McCartney at his face value" and emphasising the sentimental qualities that George Martin's orchestral arrangements for the Beatles had successfully tempered. Williams added: "Some might say that this track, above all others, epitomises Paul McCartney, and that when Spector sent the saccharine strings sweeping in after the first line of vocal, he was merely highlighting the reality." In a 2003 review for Mojo, shortly after the announcement that McCartney planned to issue "a string-less Let It Be", John Harris opined: "As someone who experiences a Proustian rush every time the orchestra crash-lands in 'The Long and Winding Road', I can only implore him to think again. Besides, underneath all the Wagnerian gloop, John's bass playing is horribly out of tune ..." Referring to the version subsequently released without the controversial overdubs, Adam Sweeting of The Guardian said the song was "indubitably improved by the removal of Spector's wall of schmaltz" but "still teeth-clenchingly mawkish". In 2011, Rolling Stone placed "The Long and Winding Road" at number 90 on its list of "The 100 Greatest Beatles Songs". On a similar list compiled by Mojo in 2006, the song appeared at number