It’s ironic that both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles released new music less than three weeks apart. It’s just like the old days.
The Rolling Stones’ new one is Hackney Diamonds, a full-length album, while the Beatles’ “Now and Then” is one final song that Paul McCartney has wanted to complete for decades. It’s been 44 years since John Lennon put the incomplete tune on a cassette. Yoko Ono then gave it to the three surviving Beatles for use on their Anthology series in the mid-1990s.
Anthology 1 opened with “Free As A Bird,” an unfinished Lennon song that McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr completed with the help of producer Jeff Lynne. They also turned “Real Love – a second Lennon track – into a genuine Beatles song for Anthology 2.
When the three ex-Beatles started working on “Now and Then,” it was supposed to be the opening track of the third compilation, but Harrison didn’t like the song so it was abandoned.
The original primitive recording contains only John Lennon’s voice and piano. At the time they couldn’t be separated properly to make a crisp final mix, which is another reason the song remained in the vaults. The cassette also had an annoying buzz that couldn’t be filtered out.
Fortunately, new AI technology has since been developed. Peter Jackson, the man behind the Get Back documentary, was finally able to make the tape usable. That allowed Starr and McCartney to enter a studio last year and complete “Now and Then” for release.
The new single includes electric and acoustic guitar from Harrison. McCartney added bass, additional piano and some slide guitar as a tribute to Harrison, and Starr added new drum and percussion parts. Lennon and McCartney share lead vocals. McCartney and Giles Martin produced a string arrangement that at the very end of the record sounds like it could have been cherrypicked off of either “I Am the Walrus” or “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and McCartney and Starr augmented the sessions with their backing vocals.
For those of you who may not think “Now and Then” is a true Beatles production because of how the song was created, constructed and completed, I would have to argue with you. It’s actually more of a Beatles work than a lot of earlier songs that had their name attached to them. All four Beatles had a hand in making this long-awaited finale – something that can’t be said about classics such as “Yesterday,” “Blackbird,” “Julia,” and a few other tunes on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album and Abbey Road.
Upon hearing “Now and Then” for the first time it sounded like a slow dirge, but after three more immediate listens to the cluttered arrangement, I quickly realized how the Beatles’ uncanny penchant for composing easily hummable melodies was in full bloom and towered over anything else they have ever put into a song.
I’ll let you decide if “Now and Then” was worth the wait. The verdict here is that while it will never become an immortal Beatles track, I’m glad it has finally been made available to the public. It’s good enough to be a deep track on one of their albums, and that’s good enough for me.
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