Considering the Beatles, ‘Now and Then’
The Beatles “new” single sounds nothing like the Beatles, which is its greatest virtue
(HUDSON, N.Y., November 17, 2023) - The first time I heard the “new” Beatles single, “Now and Then,” I was in the back seat of a car on the way to the airport. The driver had his radio tuned to what sounded like a local AM station – I didn’t know they still existed – and the song was played with little fanfare beyond “the new single by the Beatles.” I wasn’t totally surprised to hear it – I knew it was release day but I hadn’t yet had a chance to listen properly, which for me means through headphones connected to a popular “hi-res lossless” streaming service. I don’t think the driver had any idea what we were listening to. I would have liked to have known what he thought about it, but you have to be careful about opening a conversation with a stranger on what is going to be an hour-long drive. So I didn’t ask.
From the back seat through the tinny car speakers, my first thought about the song was confusion. Everything I read said that the song featured lead vocals by John Lennon. So why did it sound like Paul McCartney was singing the song? Would John’s voice take over midway through the song? Was it Paul trying to sing like John? Or was it John’s voice made to sound like Paul’s?
The answer, of course, was none of the above. The track does indeed feature John’s voice on lead vocal, with backup vocals by McCartney and, they tell us, George Harrison (damned if I can hear those), picked up from other Beatles songs and strategically inserted here, like some kind of sonic transplant surgery.
The new “Now and Then” track was built upon a late-1970s home demo that Lennon recorded onto a cassette tape. Yoko Ono handed it over to the three surviving Beatles in the mid-1990s -- along with Lennon’s “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” -- when they were overseeing a series of archival releases known as The Beatles Anthology. The multimedia retrospective included a documentary film, a book, and a three-volume set of double albums. With Ono’s blessing, McCartney, Harrison, and Ringo Starr set to work adding new instrumentals and vocals to turn the Lennon demos into “new” Beatles tracks. Motivated partly by nostalgia, partly by that old adventurous spirit that defined the Fab Four, and undoubtedly by the added commercial appeal the Anthology project would have by offering “new” songs made by all four Beatles, under the direction of Harrison’s go-to producer of the moment, Jeff Lynne (who produced Harrison’s commercially successful “comeback” album, Cloud Nine, as well as the two albums recorded by the late-1980s/early 1990s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, featuring Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Lynne), the Fab Three did the best they could to turn “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” into album-worthy Beatles tracks. (To my ears, “Free as a Bird” was unlistenable and “Real Love” sounded more like ELO than the Beatles, in spite of some standout guitar licks by Harrison.)
As for “Now and Then,” the trio began working on it but apparently ran out of time or inspiration. On hearing Lennon’s original demo, Harrison reportedly called it “fucking rubbish.” His comment may have referred to the poor sound quality of the demo, if not the song itself (or both), which basically consisted of just one repeated chorus. Whatever efforts the surviving Beatles made to create a salvageable track out of it ended there, and “Now and Then” faded back into well-deserved obscurity.
Fast forward nearly three decades. In the wake of Peter Jackson’s magical, eight-hour, 2021 documentary, Get Back, which reworked Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original film footage for his Let It Be documentary, applying state-of-the-art technology both to the sound and image, putting the viewer right in the room with the Beatles – which was a stunning technical achievement as well as a beautiful tribute to the Fab Four – Paul McCartney felt the itch to go back to “Now and Then” and see what could be made of the demo, plus the 1995 overdubs, using Jackson’s “machine-assisted learning” (or MAL) techniques. If that sounds like AI to you, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. But there is no sense getting one’s knickers in a twist about the use of AI on a Beatles track. Back in the day, the Beatles, Lennon included, were always interested in and experimenting with the latest in recording technology. There is no reason to think that Lennon (or Harrison) would have objected to the methodology used to extract Lennon’s vocals from the demo, clean them up and polish them, and make them sound as good as they do (even if that means making them sound more than a bit McCartneyesque).
Which brings us back to the final track, which instantly shot to number-one on the day of its release (November 2). It took me a while to warm up to it, but eventually I have. Not that I think it’s a worthy “final” Beatles track, because it isn’t. Like “Real Love” and “Free as a Bird,” the song itself is second- (or third-) rate solo John Lennon – the kind of song that would have been left off of his last few albums in the late-1970s and early-1980s (which is exactly what they all are). They don’t in any way sound like the Beatles, even with the overdubs by Lennon’s former bandmates. If this is what we are to believe the Beatles may have sounded like had they stayed together another decade, then we can all feel blessed knowing they went out at the top of their game with Abbey Road.
One does have to overlook several off-putting elements to enjoy “Now and Then” as it is. While the Beatles made ample use of strings, producer/arranger George Martin knew exactly how to insert them where needed and, equally as important, how to not use them where they weren’t needed. Very few Beatles songs featured backing strings throughout the entire track (and don’t come back at me with “What about ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’”—those were not backing strings; the strings provided the music for those songs), whereas they have been made a dominant element of “Now and Then,” and a syrupy one at that. (This is somewhat surprising, given how McCartney felt about the addition of these sorts of syrupy string arrangements by Phil Spector on the Let It Be album, to the point that McCartney remixed that album in 2003, stripping it of almost all the orchestral overdubs, and re-releasing it as Let It Be … Naked.) And good luck finding (or hearing) backing vocals by George and Ringo here; they tell us they are there, but I haven’t found them yet. Also, they claim that the guitar parts that Harrison worked out for the song in 1995 have been used, but you’ll (OK, I’ll) be hard-put to tell the difference between the guitar parts that are played by Harrison and those that have been overdubbed by McCartney in the style of Harrison. But even that has some kind of correct historical resonance to it, as McCartney played his fair share of lead guitar on Beatles tracks, including on Harrison’s own composition, “Taxman,” and sometimes he did attempt to mimic Harrison’s sound.
So what is there to like about “Now and Then”? Well, time and technology has done it some great favors. And as slight a song as it is – and it remains very slight – its minor-to-major chord progression is catchy. They don’t make mid-tempo pop-rock ballads like this anymore, and I miss those. I am not one for nostalgia or sentimentality, either, but there is no denying that, given its current context, the song might even have more meaning now than when Lennon originally wrote it then, presumably as a love song to Yoko Ono. Listening to it now, especially after watching the accompanying music video and the short documentary film about the making of the track, one simply cannot help but hear it as a tribute to Lennon himself (weird, since it is his song and he is singing it) and to the Beatles as a whole, a tribute to what they shared as a band of brothers and to what we have lost ever since they broke up, including two of the four of them.
So if the only thing “Now and Then” does is make us think about the Beatles and what made them so great – even if it does so by negative implication, by what is not so great about “Now and Then” – that, in and of itself, might be the new recording’s greatest virtue. Because … Beatles.
[This is the first of a two-part review of “new” Beatles music. The second part will discuss the recent MAL-assisted remixes of the Beatles “Red” and “Blue” albums.]
Seth Rogovoy is the author of Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2024.
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