What Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr both dubbed “the final Beatles album,” was released on Nov. 2, 2023.
The titular track, “Now and Then”, is a new song in The Beatles’ musical catalog. It was originally a demo of a love ballad that the late Beatles member John Lennon wrote for his wife, Yoko Ono.
The story of how the track was finished adds a new dimension to Lennon’s original meaning. After Lennon was assassinated in 1980, Ono gifted some tapes that Lennon had recorded to George Harrison, another member of the Beatles. Harrison began working with McCartney and Starr to finish the songs using Lennon’s vocals and musical groundwork from the demos. These works were completed and released in the Beatles’ “Anthology” series of albums.
However, Lennon recorded “Now and Then” in his noisy apartment where a loud piano and the street traffic outside drowned out his vocals. The quality of the demo and the technological constraints at the time of the “Anthology” recordings led the remaining members of the Beatles to scrap the project.
Harrison passed away in 2001, further complicating the prospect of the Beatles ever completing the project. This was the belief until new artificial intelligence technologies had finally made it possible.
After AI was able to revive the song and isolate the ghostly vocals of the late singer, the song has been given a two-dimensional meaning further nuanced by his living bandmates harmonizing with his vocals singing emotionally-charged lyrics.
McCartney had announced on BBC Radio 1 in June that the project was due to be released in November.
The emotion of the song is summarized by the somber piano in the background with the guitar as a long-departed Lennon sings, “I know, it’s true. It’s all because of you.”
Shortly after, Starr begins to play the drums, and later, McCartney harmonizes with Lennon on an especially meaningful line.
“Now and Then, I miss you,” the old friends from Liverpool, alive and departed, sing together decades apart. “Oh, Now and Then, I want you to be there for me.”
When it was recorded, Lennon was singing to Ono, but in the modern portion recorded by McCartney and Starr, they are singing to an old friend who had since passed away.
It is a beautiful moment to Beatles fans, young and old, as they hear McCartney and Starr singing to their loved one who had previously recorded it without the assumption that its meaning would later be altered in such a beautiful way.
In totality, the song covers a wide range of emotions through a harmony of work completed over decades. It may be the first time that humanity has heard such a ballad that embodies love while letting friends confront the grief of losing one another, together, some four decades later.
“Now and Then” is a fitting final song for the band who captivated the world in what media at the time declared was “Beatlemania”.
