Come Together - Remastered 2009

"Come Together" is a song by the English rock band The Beatles, written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. The song is the opening track on their 1969 album Abbey Road and was also released as a single coupled with Something "". The song reached the top of the charts in the United States and peaked at No. 4 in the United Kingdom.

It has been covered by several other artists, including Ike & Tina Turner, Aerosmith and Michael Jackson.

In early 1969, John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, held nonviolent protests against the Vietnam War, dubbed the Bed-ins for Peace. In May, during the Montreal portion of the bed-in, counterculture figures from across North America visited Lennon, including American psychologist Timothy Leary, an early advocate of LSD whom Lennon admired. Leary intended to run for Governor of California in the following year's election and asked Lennon to write him a campaign song based on the campaign's slogan, "Come Together – Join the Party!" The resulting chant was only a line long: "Come together and join the party". Lennon promised to finish and record the song, and Leary later recalled Lennon giving him a tape of the piece, but the two did not interact again.

In July 1969, during sessions for the Beatles' album Abbey Road, Lennon used the phrase "come together" from the Leary campaign song to compose a new song for the album. Based on the 1956 single "You Can't Catch Me" by American guitarist Chuck Berry, the composition began as an up-tempo blues number, only slightly altering Berry's original lyric of "Here come a flattop / He was movin' up with me" to "Here come ol' flattop / He come groovin' up slowly". Lennon further incorporated the phrase "shoot me" from his unfinished and unreleased January 1969 song, "Watching Rainbows". With lyrics inspired by his relationship with Ono, the lyrics were delivered quickly like the Berry song, author Peter Doggett writing that "each phrase too quickly to be understood at first hearing, the sound as important as the meaning".

When Lennon presented the composition to his bandmates, his songwriting partner Paul McCartney noticed its similarity to "You Can't Catch Me" and recommended they slow it in tempo to reduce the resemblance.

Beatles historian Jonathan Gould has suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait".

In a December 1987 interview by Selina Scott on the television show West 57th Street, George Harrison stated that he wrote two lines of the song.

"Come Together" has frequently appeared on numerous publications' lists of the Beatles' best songs. In 2006, Mojo magazine placed it at No. 13 in their list of the Beatles' 101 best songs. Four years later, Rolling Stone ranked it No. 9 on their list of the band's 100 greatest songs. Meanwhile, Entertainment Weekly and Ultimate Classic Rock ranked it at No. 44 and No. 20, respectively. In 2015, NME and Paste placed it at No. 20 and No. 23 in their respective lists of the band's best songs.

Rolling Stone ranked "Come Together" at No. 202 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004, re-ranking it No. 205 in the 2010 revised list. Based on the song's appearances in professional rankings and listings, the aggregate website Acclaimed Music lists "Come Together" as the 16th most acclaimed song of 1969, the 113th most acclaimed song of the 1960s and the 393rd most acclaimed song in history.