Five Thoughts About the Beatles' Last Song, “Now and Then”
The last album the Beatles recorded ended with “The End.” (Unless you count “Her Majesty.”) But the actual end of the band’s official output—at least according to the marketing materials—came on Thursday, when the corporate entity called the Beatles released “Now and Then.” The song, which was written by John Lennon in the late 1970s and demoed on a handheld cassette recorder perched on his piano, was considered for the full-band treatment during the 1995 Beatles Anthology project, when the surviving “Threetles” (Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr) worked with producer Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra and Traveling Wilburys fame to finish a few of Lennon’s songs.
Included on the tapes Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, had given McCartney were demos of four tracks: “Free As a Bird,” “Real Love,” “Grow Old With Me,” and “Now and Then.” Lennon’s former bandmates recorded the first two but passed on recording “Grow Old With Me,” which had already been released on the posthumous Milk and Honey in 1984. (Starr and McCartney would eventually cover it on Starr’s 2019 solo album, What’s My Name.) After some experimentation, they also rejected “Now and Then,” largely at the behest of Harrison, who thought the quality of Lennon’s demo was insufficient for a full-fledged recording.
Source: Ben Lindbergh/theringer.com
