The magic of the Beatles, and the thing that most sets them apart most from their ’60s peers, is the tidiness of their cultural output. They existed for a short time, wrote many songs, played live for only about half of their existence, and left behind a rich and compact recorded legacy that seems both perfect and complete when you first encounter it. Because their work is so tightly circumscribed, including only activity that went down between 1960 and 1970, bringing their music back into circulation for new generations requires transformation via technology. As the tech improves, product offerings continue to expand, from CDs to films to vault-clearing compilations to remixes. The apogee of this tendency arrived in 2021 with the astonishing series Get Back, assembled by Peter Jackson from footage recorded for the Let It Be film, which used digital algorithms and machine-learning to “demix” the audio and isolate moments that would have been inaudible before.
In the mid ’90s, the big news on the Beatles front was the Anthology film, compilations, and book, which told the story of the band through interviews and presented an alternate history via unreleased material. Included as part of the project were two “new” Beatles songs, “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” which were created around John Lennon demos recorded in the ’70s. A third Lennon song, “Now and Then,” was also considered for burnishing and release at the time, and Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr tinkered with it a bit before abandoning the idea. Harrison didn’t care for the tune and the demo was especially crude, with a prominent piano that obscured Lennon’s voice and a hum that proved difficult to remove without affecting the rest of the recording. The tech wasn’t there. Cut to this decade, and the Beatles’ label is assembling new versions of their two iconic best-of sets, the Red Album and the Blue Album, both of which incorporate remixes by Gilles Martin. Working with Jackson’s technology, McCartney and Starr—Harrison died in 2001—were able to isolate Lennon’s voice and finally build a proper track around it.
It’s hard on initial listens to “Now and Then” not to hear the technology that went into the record rather than the record itself. “Is that guitar strum George’s?” you might wonder, trying to guess how the parts were assembled and when. This tendency to hear the parts rather than the finished product is reinforced by the nature of the song itself: It’s a tense, vulnerable, minor-key number. Lennon was writing ballads like this at the end of his life—the demo probably dates from 1979, and he was murdered the following year—and some of the better ones wound up on two albums with Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy and the posthumous Milk and Honey. One imagines he was very much in a “non-Beatles” headspace by that time.
These Lennon ballads from the period—“Woman,” “Watching the Wheels”—were sung from the perspective of a guy approaching 40 who had lost some toughness and was coming at music from a humbler place than he had in the first 15 years of his recording career. And it’s slightly unnerving listening to “Now and Then” now and hearing something so personal and intimate blown up into a super-sized Beatles track, with strings and many layers of backing voices. The proportions feel off.
But over several listens, the backstory starts to fall away, and the song as a whole sinks in. There is a palpable yearning to Lennon’s voice and melody, an ache derived from a separation that feels real. And though it’s framed with sonic drama that turns that hurt into theater, it works reasonably well on that level. If Lennon’s demo is all about personal pain and intimacy, then the fully produced Beatles’ version is a technicolor movie created for IMAX screens that uses as its subject personal pain and intimacy.
To my ear, “Now and Then” is the weakest of the posthumous singles. “Real Love” has the best tune, one so melodic and ’50s-indebted that it’s possible to imagine it as an actual Beatles song. And “Free As a Bird” has the best production, as Jeff Lynne’s approximation of the Beatles sound wisely foregrounds Ringo’s drums; if you squint a bit, you could imagine it orbiting somewhere in the vicinity of Abbey Road. “Now and Then” is pretty much impossible to imagine as an actual Beatles song, and it seems especially far from what might have been Lennon’s original intention. And yet, it’s enjoyable just the same.
That’s another part of the Beatles’ magic: whatever cynicism one develops around the evils of the music industry and its constant need for expansion into new formats, little of that negativity sticks to their output, even though it’s generated by exactly the same market forces. Perhaps it has something to do with the band ending before any of its members had reached the age of 30—they always seem to have the innocence of youth on their side, and I find myself wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt. In that spirit, here’s one final Beatles single, a song that is far from great but could have been a lot worse—it was laid aside and left incomplete years ago, and now it exists.
