The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’ Is a Bittersweet Finale for the Fab Four’s Recording Career: Single Review

With all the hoopla around “Now and Then” — which has been officially billed as “The Last Beatles Song” and erroneously described as the legendary group’s “first new song in 50 years” — some reality-checking is in order. Yes, it is a “new” Beatles song in that all four members, including the late John Lennon and George Harrison, play and sing on a previously unreleased composition. But it is not some long-lost “Abbey Road” outtake (those were all exhumed long ago), and in reality even Lennon’s part was recorded and presumably written many years after the Beatles broke up.

“Now and Then” has a similar provenance as “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” the other two “new” Beatles songs to have been released since 1970: All are rough Lennon home demos recorded during the late 1970s and provided by his wife Yoko Ono in 1994 for the surviving members to complete.

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The songs were intended for the three-volume “Beatles Anthology” outtakes collection (and accompanying long-form video) released in 1995 and ’96. The other two songs were completed and released on Vols. 1 and 2, but Vol. 3 was issued without one: Although the surviving members at the time — Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Harrison, along with “Anthology” co-producer Jeff Lynne — recorded instrumental backings for “Now and Then,” they were unable to finish it satisfactorily due to Lennon’s piano drowning out his voice in places on the demo (as detailed in the 12-minute documentary video released yesterday).

However, with the use of the AI technology that Peter Jackson used to separate voices from background noise in the 2021 “Get Back” Beatles documentary, he was able to isolate Lennon’s vocal. And last year McCartney, Starr, co-producer Giles Martin and others finished the song, leaving only Lennon’s original vocal and Harrison’s 1994 guitar tracks. Thus, this “new” Beatles song was recorded in three separate segments, across 45-odd years.

So that’s the how and why; the real — unfair — question is whether the song comes close to measuring up to the Beatles or their collective solo works’ towering legacy. Of course it doesn’t, but it’s still an unexpected pleasure that marks the completion of the group’s last bit of unfinished business.

The song’s beginning will be breathtaking for fans: It opens with a familiar Beatles count-in, following by classic Lennonesque piano chords and a strummed acoustic guitar, and then — that voice, pristine, singing “I know it’s true, it’s all because of you,” and following an unmistakably Lennon melody. The rest of the group quickly comes in — Starr’s drums, a definitive McCartney bassline, subtle three-part harmonies on the backing vocals, an orchestra playing a vaguely “Eleanor Rigby”-ish accompaniment. Later in the song, McCartney pays tribute to Harrison by playing a brief slide guitar solo, and bolsters Lennon’s lead vocal in a couple of spots where it presumably faltered or was obscured on the demo. The song is similar to and on a par with “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” and it’s safe to say they’ve made it as good as it probably could be.

A glass-half-empty take would point out it certainly sounds like a rough and incomplete sketch of a song reassembled and elaborately embellished, rather than a complete one. The lyrics in particular bear this out: It’s hard to imagine Lennon being happy with lines like, “I know it’s true, it’s all because of you/ And if I make it through, it’s all because of you,” which recall the dashed-off lyrics of early Beatles songs and the lightweight practices the group, inspired by Bob Dylan and others, railed against in the mid-1960s. Likewise, the song has clearly been reverse-engineered into a conventional structure— as McCartney can be heard in the video arranging individual parts.

But such meh takes are the reason why people hate critics, and there’s not much point in raining on the parade. And although this may be the last “new” Beatles song, the parade will go on for many years to come. The forthcoming reissue of the popular “1962-66” and “1967-1970” collections — known and the red and blue albums — features AI-aided remixes of their group’s early material (full separation of the instruments was not possible with earlier technology), and there are still five early albums due to receive the full deluxe-edition treatment that we saw with last year’s “Revolver” redux. And beyond that, it seems inevitable that the group’s scream-saturated live recordings and countless hours of video footage will get an AI treatment as well. Beatles revivals will outlive us all.

So in the end, “Now and Then” is not a lost Beatles classic. But to paraphrase McCartney’s famous quote regarding criticism of the “White Album,” “It’s a bloody new Beatles song, shut up!”

“Now And Then” Credits:

Produced by Paul McCartney, Giles Martin

Additional Production: Jeff Lynne

Vocals: John Lennon, Paul McCartney

Backing Vocals: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr

Guitars: George Harrison

Guitars, Bass, Piano, Electric Harpsichord, Shaker: Paul McCartney

Drums, Tambourine, Shaker: Ringo Starr

Additional Credits:

String Arrangement: Paul McCartney, Giles Martin, Ben Foster

Mixed by Spike Stent

Engineered by Geoff Emerick, Steve Orchard, Greg McAllister, Jon Jacobs, Steve Genewick, Bruce Sugar, Keith Smith

Source Separation / MAL Courtesy of WingNut Films Productions Ltd.

Head of Machine Learning: Emile de la Rey

Project Management: Adam Sharp

Recorded at Hog Hill Studio, Capitol Studios and Roccabella West

Mastered by Miles Showell

Project Producers: Jonathan Clyde and Guy Hayden

Executive Producer: Jeff Jones

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