On November 2, The Beatles released the song “Now And Then”. This is the band’s first new song in 27 years – and, according to the official press release, its last. “Medusa” tells the complex story of this composition – and how it happened that it was released right now.
“Now And Then” – the “last” song of The Beatles
Where do The Beatles even get new songs? Didn’t they break up half a century ago?
The Beatles essentially ceased to exist in 1970 – and the separation was not amicable. One reason had to do with the group’s affairs: Paul McCartney did not want to be managed by manager Allen Klein, who had been hired by John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and sued his friends to dissolve the partnership. In addition, the musicians clearly had accumulated personal and creative contradictions, and they began to speak harshly about each other publicly – in particular, Lennon gave Rolling Stone magazine interviewfull of attacks on McCartney.
The musicians were featured not only in the press, but also in songs. The most striking example is Lennon’s «How Do You Sleep?» 1971, in which Harrison also took part. It essentially consisted of a frank and brutal attack on McCartney, and Lennon subsequently tried to improve the song’s reputation by claiming that he was actually criticizing himself.
However, John and Paul most likely not only clashed in songs, but also simply expressed bitterness over their conflict, and also asked each other for forgiveness. Fortunately, relations between them soon began to improve – and this was again reflected in their music: in 1973, McCartney released a love song «Let Me Roll It»the arrangement of which stylistically referred to Lennon’s solo works, and John responded by inserting a guitar passage from it into one of his compositions.
In the 1970s, members of The Beatles often helped each other in the studio (Ringo collaborated most with former colleagues), and John and Paul even crossed paths while recording singer Harry Neilson’s album in Los Angeles (here’s how it goes) sounded). However, the four of them never worked together again – although, according to various accounts, they considered such a possibility. In December 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed, and hope for a reunion was lost.
In the mid-1990s, Paul, George and Ringo finally met in the studio – they decided to record new music for a large-scale Anthology project, which included a documentary television series about The Beatles, the release of their archival recordings and the publication of a large book about the history of the group. The basis for the new recordings was a cassette of John’s home demo recordings, which was given to them by his widow Yoko Ono. As a result, the Threetles, as journalists and fans began to call them, finalized and released two of John’s songs from this tape – “Free as a Bird” (1995) and “Real Love” (1996).
“Free As A Bird” is a song by John Lennon, modified by the rest of The Beatles in the mid-1990s.
“Real Love” is the second Lennon song completed by The Beatles in the 1990s
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Published in 2023, “Now And Then” was on the same cassette. And although the song was never released in the 1990s, many fans of The Beatles heard it in one form or another: on the Internet you can find both Lennon’s demo recording and numerous attempts by fans to complete it themselves in the style of The Beatles. Most Popular (and Persuasive) fan version “Now And Then” was released in 2007 on a YouTube channel that, oddly enough, mainly produced conspiracy videos about Paul McCartney. This version, in various variations, has since regularly appeared on YouTube – and is certainly removed for copyright infringement.
Why is Now And Then coming out now?
In 1994–1995, the Threetles tried to finish “Now And Then” but abandoned the idea. Working on John Lennon’s songs was not so easy – not only from a psychological point of view (the musicians agreed that they would imagine that Lennon had simply left, leaving them his recordings), but also from a technical one. The recordings were of poor quality. In the 1990s, it took a long time to clear them of noise – and despite these efforts, Lennon’s voice was still noticeably inferior in sound quality to all other components of the recording. Also, John didn’t finish all of these songs.
First, in early 1994, Paul, George and Ringo recorded “Free as a Bird,” which they first had to finish composing. They then took on “Now And Then”, which was also missing a few words, but eventually abandoned it and moved on to the fully finished song, “Real Love”. It is believed that George Harrison did not want to continue working on Now And Then in the first place – but why is not known exactly. After the death of guitarist Paul McCartney told, that he allegedly called “Now And Then” “damn nonsense,” from which many concluded that he did not like the composition itself – and when in 2023 it became clear that the song was still being prepared for publication, controversy began among fans about the admissibility of this. However, in official press release On the release of Now And Then, Harrison’s heirs emphasized that his complaints were only about the quality of the recording – and that, in their opinion, he would happily join Paul and Ringo in the studio in 2023 if he were alive.
Demo of “Now and Then” by John Lennon
McCartney has repeatedly made it clear that he wants to finish “Now And Then”. The technical opportunity for this appeared thanks to director Peter Jackson, who in 2021 released a multi-hour documentary television film about The Beatles. For this project, Jackson worked with dozens of hours of monophonic recordings, in which the musicians’ voices were often inaudible due to their own playing of instruments. To make speech audible, the director’s team taught artificial intelligence to decompose the recording into instruments and voices – and to do this, unlike programs available on the market, with minimal distortion. The Beatles immediately took advantage of this technology – producer Giles Martin, who has been remixing the band’s music for anniversary releases for several years, began using it to separate instruments recorded onto one track. The same program was used for “Now And Then” – to take only John Lennon’s voice from the demo recording, without piano and without noise.
The use of AI in the work on the “last song” of The Beatles caused a small scandal: when Paul McCartney mentioned it in an interview in the summer of 2023, many concluded that the neural network generated the voice of John Lennon, as in numerous fakes that were widely discussed in the first half of the year. As a result McCartney and son of John Lennon So I had to explain that they used artificial intelligence differently.
Why was Paul so eager to finish this song?
There is a view that “Now And Then”, which talks about missing a loved one and being reunited, is one of the songs in which John and Paul communicated with each other. This assumption was expressed not only by the authors specialized podcasts, but also a person from the circle of The Beatles – the producer of the new recording, Giles Martin. “I feel like ‘Now And Then’ is John’s love letter to Paul,” said he in an interview with People magazine. “I didn’t ask Paul about it, and I’m not sure he would say, ‘Yes, that’s the way it is,’ because he wouldn’t want to speak for John.” But that’s the feeling I got. And I think that’s why Paul was so determined to finish it.”
Perhaps the key to understanding Paul McCartney’s attitude towards this song is the story that told legendary American singer Carl Perkins, whose songs The Beatles constantly performed in their early years. In February 1981 – two months after the death of John Lennon – Paul McCartney invited Perkins to the British island of Montserrat to participate in the recording of his solo album. At the end of his stay, Karl wrote a song as a sign of gratitude, which included the words: “My old friend, wonʼt you think about me every now and then“(My old friend, think about me sometimes”). According to the musician’s recollections, when he sang it, Paul left the room in tears. Linda McCartney thanked Perkins, saying his song allowed her husband to finally give in to his emotions after the death of a friend – and then said that the last time John saw him, he told Paul goodbye: “Think about me sometimes, old friend.” every now and then, my old friend”). McCartney himself, who recorded “My Old Friend” with Perkins, did not comment on this story.
Carl Perkins and Paul McCartney sing “My Old Friend”
What happened in the end?
It was an idea to polish and publish unreleased songs of deceased famous musicians long before The Beatles – this was done, for example, with the demo recordings of the Beatles’ idol Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash back in 1959. The peculiarity of “Now And Then” is that the work on the song dragged on for decades. In addition to John Lennon’s voice from 1978 and instruments recorded in 2022 and 2023, the final version includes rhythm guitar parts that George Harrison recorded in the 1990s.
Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney re-recorded drums and bass; Paul also played the piano part from the original demo clean and performed a guitar solo with a slide, using Harrison’s favorite technique. Producer Giles Martin wrote the string arrangement – according to McCartney, in the same spirit as his father George Martin did for The Beatles.
Documentary about the making of “Now And Then”
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Also, Martin, wanting “Now And Then” to feature the signature Beatles sing-along, inserted vocal harmonies into the song from the group’s old recordings – the songs “Because”, “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Eleanor Rigby”. The same technique was used by the creator of the most popular (and constantly deleted from YouTube) fan version of 2007; Whether Martin heard this version is unknown.
The Beatles noticeably changed the structure of the composition. In Lennon’s demo, the song had three repeating parts, which can be labeled as the verse, pre-chorus and chorus; in the new version only the verses and choruses remained. For people already familiar with the song, this is a major change, since in the original version the pre-chorus is probably the most emotionally charged moment: the song the tone suddenly changes, and Lennon, switching to falsetto, sings “I don’t wanna lose you, oh no, no, no” (“I don’t want to lose you, oh no, no, no”). It can be assumed that it was decided to throw out this part due to missing lines.
On November 3, a video for the song “Now And Then” will be released, edited by Peter Jackson from previously unpublished archival materials and filming from 2023 with the participation of Paul and Ringo.
Will “Now And Then” really be the last Beatles song?
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr They call “Now And Then” the last song to feature all four members of The Beatles. They probably aren’t going to record any more new music under this name – but that doesn’t mean they won’t work together again: just in October, 83-year-old Ringo released another EP, in which one of the songs was written (and almost entirely recorded) by 81-year-old Paul, and shortly before that, singer Dolly Parton released his version of the Beatles’ “Let It Be”in which they both took part.
Despite the release of the “last” song, fans of The Beatles are waiting for the release of many more recordings – including those that, unlike “Now And Then”, were not even obtained by pirates, and the fact that they exist is known only according to stories. First of all, there is the avant-garde 1967 recording “Carnival of Light,” which was not included in either the 1996 Anthology or the 2017 Sgt Pepper anniversary edition. Beatles fans too count onthat Peter Jackson is using artificial intelligence developed by his team for restoration records from 1962 from Hamburg’s Star Club, a rare document showing The Beatles as the clubbing, energetic group they were before they became popular.
