On Oct. 5th, 1962, the Beatles released their first single, and 61 years later, they have released their last.
“Now And Then,” which was released to the public on Nov. 22nd, is the Beatles’ final collaboration.
The gestation of “Now And Then” was a long one. The song was never intended to be a Beatles song. Written by John Lennon well after the band’s breakup and recorded on a tape machine and stashed away, the cassette titled “Now + Then” was found in 1994 by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s wife.
While the song itself had been recorded in 1978 and had spent some time circulating as a bootleg, “Now And Then” had never been professionally recorded in a studio. Two other songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” which had also been discovered by Ono following Lennon’s death, were completed by the remaining Beatles and released as singles in 1995 and 1996.
But they spent no more than a day on “Now And Then” before deciding it was hopeless. The sound quality of Lennon’s recording was incredibly poor and producer Jeff Lynne said that “the song had a chorus but [was] almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn’t finish.” While the rest of the living Beatles moved on, Paul McCartney never let go of the idea.
McCartney decided to send the recording to Peter Jackson, the director of the recent Beatles documentary. The hope was that Jackson could use the same technology the film team had used to clarify speaking voices to improve the quality of the track. Using this software that “de-mixes” muddled recordings, McCartney and Starr, the last living members of the band, were able to “lift” Lennon’s vocals from the original cassette recording and rerecord the song. McCartney claimed that following this process, Lennon’s voice was crystal clear.
“I do feel as though ‘Now And Then’ is a love letter to Paul written by John,” Beatles producer George Martin said “[I believe] that’s why Paul was so determined to finish it.” With lyrics such as “And now and then / If we must start again / Well, we will know for sure / That I will love you,” this is not a hard statement to believe.
Lennon and McCartney met as two motherless teenagers bound together by the music they were creating together. While the Beatles would eventually break up, Lennon and McCartney would continue to communicate using songs, albeit not in a friendly way. In McCartney’s album “Ram” (“You took your lucky break and broke it in two”) and in Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?” (“the only thing you done was yesterday”), the two took turns taking stabs at one another. While they would eventually attempt to make up before Lennon’s tragic death, Lennon said in 1968, “talking is the slowest form of communicating … Music is much better.”
Perhaps that is what both men had in mind when creating “Now And Then” across the span of the 45 years they spent apart.
“When we’re in the studio, we had John’s voice in our ears so you could imagine he was just in the next room in a vocal booth and we were just working with him again, so it was joyful,” McCartney told the BBC. “All those memories came flooding back … My God, how lucky was I to have those men in my life?”
Clearly, both McCartney and Beatles fans feel the same way about “Now And Then.” After less than a day of availability, the song shot to number one on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart.
Skylar Moody, a young fan of the Beatles, said in a TikTok video that her “heart feels so heavy right now, but in a good way.” She added that she was so happy that fans got to experience their last song together in such an emotional way.
While the Beatles will never have the chance to play all together again, “Now And Then” seems to have given both the remaining Beatles and their fans the closure they needed.
