Now and Then (Beatles song)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Now and Then" arrived on the 2nd of November 2023 carrying a weight no pop single ever had before: it was billed as the last Beatles song. Fifty-three years after the band broke apart, three of its surviving members and one ghost took their places in the recording chain and finished what John Lennon had started alone in his apartment at the Dakota in New York City around 1977. The questions that follow are not small ones. How do you complete a song by a dead man without betraying him? How do you use a technology that barely existed a decade ago to rescue a voice buried under decades of tape hiss? And what does it mean when the result is both unmistakably the Beatles and, in the ears of some critics, something else entirely?

• 2. Lennon's Unfinished Demo

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  Lennon recorded a five-minute piano demo of "Now and Then" around 1977 at his home at the Dakota in New York City. He taped it on a home recorder, playing solo piano and singing directly into the device. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, writing for the Los Angeles Times, later called it "a wispy, melancholy ballad". The lyrics fell into the category of apologetic love songs that Lennon had favored in the latter half of his career. Most of the verses were nearly complete, though a few lines were never fleshed out. After Lennon died in 1980, the tape sat unheard by his bandmates for years. It was Yoko Ono who finally passed it along, giving Paul McCartney two cassette tapes in January 1994 with a note on each reading "For Paul".

• 3. The Shelved 1995 Sessions

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  In March 1995, McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr gathered to attempt a third Beatles reunion single. They had already completed "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" from other Lennon home demos; this session targeted "Now and Then". The band recorded a rough backing track that included acoustic and electric guitars from Harrison, a rough drum track from Starr, and bass, piano, and synthesizer from McCartney. Producer Jeff Lynne later recalled that the sessions amounted to "one day, one afternoon, really, messing with it". Two technical problems strangled the effort. The piano Lennon played during the original recording was noisy and kept drowning out his vocals. A 60-Hz mains hum ran through the entire demo, and it was noticeably louder on "Now and Then" than on the other tapes. Harrison, whose dislike of the recording was decisive, reportedly called it "fucking rubbish". McCartney told Q magazine in 1997 that "George didn't like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn't do it." The project went into storage for nearly three decades.

• 4. MAL and the Recovered Voice

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  Peter Jackson's production company WingNut Films spent four years developing audio separation technology for the 2021 documentary series The Beatles: Get Back. The neural network they built was called MAL, short for machine-assisted learning, named after the Beatles' former road manager Mal Evans and as a pun on HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. WingNut had already used MAL for the 2022 remix of the 1966 album Revolver, working from four-track master tapes. When the company turned MAL on Lennon's "Now and Then" demo, they worked from a digital copy supplied by Sean Lennon. That copy was significantly cleaner than the third-generation tape the surviving Beatles had struggled with in 1995. MAL isolated Lennon's vocal from the piano track with a clarity that the 1995 sessions had been unable to achieve. McCartney clarified in June 2023 that the process had not created anything synthetically: "It's all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings, a process which has gone on for years."

• 5. Building the Final Version

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  McCartney recorded bass guitar, a slide guitar solo styled as a tribute to Harrison, electric harpsichord, backing vocals, and piano at his home studio in East Sussex. Starr recorded a finalized drum track and backing vocals at his studio in Los Angeles. Harrison's guitar parts from the 1995 sessions, both acoustic and electric, were reinserted. McCartney, Giles Martin (son of longtime Beatles producer George Martin), and Ben Foster then composed a string arrangement, recorded at Capitol Studios under the decoy working title "Give & Take" during late April 2022 to prevent leaks. McCartney and Martin also wove in snatches of original Beatles vocal recordings from "Here, There and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby", and "Because", following methods previously used for the 2006 remix album Love. McCartney made a significant structural edit: he removed a long middle section present in Lennon's original demo, explaining that he believed Lennon would have agreed the song was stronger without it. The finished track ran almost a minute shorter than Lennon's original recording.

• 6. The Artwork's Hidden Sign

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  Ed Ruscha, known for incorporating text into his artworks, designed the front cover of the vinyl single. The back cover carried a more intimate story. Artist Chris Giffin had made a folk art clock from recycled materials, and George Harrison bought it in Providence, Rhode Island during a 1997 visit to see his son Dhani at Brown University. The clock sat in Olivia Harrison's home until the summer of 2022. She had recently cleaned it and replaced its battery when McCartney called to discuss plans for the new single. While they spoke, she glanced up at the clock face and noticed it incorporated the words "Now" and "Then". Olivia later described herself as "dumbfounded" by the coincidence. She added a photograph of the Beatles to the clock's face, replacing a Victorian family portrait in the original design, and contacted Giffin for permission before allowing the image to appear on the release.

• 7. Charts and Critical Division

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  "Now and Then" debuted on the UK Singles Chart at number 42 on the 3rd of November 2023, based on just ten hours of sales. The following week it rose 41 positions to reach number one. That was the Beatles' first UK chart-topper in 54 years, their last having been "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in 1969. The gap set a record for the longest span between number one singles by any act. The single accumulated 78,000 units in its first full week, with 48,000 coming from physical sales and downloads. It also topped charts in Germany and Austria and reached the top ten in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Critical opinion split sharply. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone called it "the final masterpiece that the Beatles and their fans deserve". Jon Pareles of The New York Times concluded that "its existence matters more than its quality". Russell Root of Salon went further, calling it "not a Beatles song, but rather a Beatles tribute song". The song scored an 87 out of 100 on Metacritic. At the 67th Annual Grammy Awards it won Best Rock Performance and received a nomination for Record of the Year, making it historically the first recording assisted by artificial intelligence to receive a Grammy nomination.

• 8. The Music Video and Its Divisions

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  Peter Jackson directed the music video, which premiered on the 3rd of November 2023. Jackson described himself as initially "very reluctant" to take the job, citing the weight of responsibility. Apple unearthed over 14 hours of footage from the 1995 recording sessions, and Sean Lennon and Olivia Harrison contributed unseen home movie material. Most strikingly, Pete Best supplied a few seconds of the Beatles performing in leather suits, described as the earliest known film of the band. Jackson used Weta FX to juxtapose 1967 promotional footage of Lennon and Harrison with 2023 footage of McCartney and Starr. The result divided viewers. Purav Menon of The Oxford Student praised its emotional power, especially a closing sequence that traced the Beatles back to their origins as the Quarrymen at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. Sam Adams of Slate called it "an abomination" and accused Jackson of wanting to "erase" the decades rather than merely bridge them. Jackson himself said he found it easier to think of the project not as a music video but as a short film. The footage supplied by Pete Best remains its most historically irreplaceable element.