The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’ Is a Bittersweet Finale for the Fab Four’s Recording Career: Single Review
02.11.2023 - 14:35
/ variety.com
Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music With all the hoopla around “Now and Then” — which has been officially billed as “The Last Beatles Song” and erroneously described as the legendary group’s “first new song in 50 years” — some reality-checking is in order. Yes, it is a “new” Beatles song in that all four members, including the late John Lennon and George Harrison, play and sing on a previously unreleased composition.
But it is not some long-lost “Abbey Road” outtake (those were all exhumed long ago), and in reality even Lennon’s part was recorded and presumably written many years after the Beatles broke up. “Now and Then” has a similar provenance as “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” the other two “new” Beatles songs to have been released since 1970: All are rough Lennon home demos recorded during the late 1970s and provided by his wife Yoko Ono in 1994 for the surviving members to complete.
The songs were intended for the three-volume “Beatles Anthology” outtakes collection (and accompanying long-form video) released in 1995 and ’96. The other two songs were completed and released on Vols.
1 and 2, but Vol. 3 was issued without one: Although the surviving members at the time — Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Harrison, along with “Anthology” co-producer Jeff Lynne — recorded instrumental backings for “Now and Then,” they were unable to finish it satisfactorily due to Lennon’s piano drowning out his voice in places on the demo (as detailed in the 12-minute documentary video released yesterday).
However, with the use of the AI technology that Peter Jackson used to separate voices from background noise in the 2021 “Get Back” Beatles documentary, he was able to isolate Lennon’s vocal. And last year McCartney, Starr,
.
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.