144. Now and Then
The last Beatles song trades heavily in nostalgia, for better and for worse
I have a lot of mixed feelings about the three new Beatles songs.
On the one hand, they clearly aren’t ‘real’ Beatles songs. On the other hand, they’re obviously different from any other non-canonical tracks. That makes it hard to really fit them into the broader narrative of the Beatles discography and history. But for the purposes of this project, I’ve decided to include them in my ranking. And so we start here with Now and Then. Which has (by far) the strangest journey to its final state.
Three decades ago, Yoko handed over some demos to the remaining Beatles. Two of those tracks (Free as a Bird and Real Love) were completed. The third was abandoned. And if you’ve ever listened to the demo, the reasons are pretty obvious. None of the original recordings were particularly pristine, but Now and Then was a lot worse than the others—full of tape hiss and ambient noise. So they did their best with the other two (to varying degrees of success) but gave up pretty quickly on the idea of extracting something useful from this one.
There’s also been some reporting that George just wasn’t that interested in Now and Then as a song, independent of its mechanical issues. And frankly, I’m kind of with him. The “now and then, I miss you” melody is nice, but there isn’t a whole lot else in it. So it’s not surprising that it simply sat in the vault for the better part of thirty years.
But as it tends to do, the technology advanced. And so people started to wonder. I can remember a fair bit of speculation in the mid 2010s, and things got a lot more pointed after the Peter Jackson Get Back documentary. Partly because the project revitalized interest in the Beatles and their legacy, but mostly because of the audio-restoration technology they had used. If it was possible to get such clear and crisp sound from the old footage, why wouldn’t they take another crack at Now and Then?
Did this song really need to be made?
The primary argument against revisiting Now and Then is pretty straightforward: George is dead. And not murdered by an assassin’s bullet—like the one that robbed John of his life long before it rightly should have ended—but just dead in the normal way of things. George simply passed, as all things must. So the case for ‘bringing him back’ is a lot hazier.
Another argument is that the final product still suffers from the same basic problem as it did in the 90s. While it’s very impressive that they were able to clean up the tape this much, it’s not clean clean. And there still just isn’t actually that much song here. Basically just a verse, a refrain, all scaffolded around some lengthy instrumental breaks that do manage to feel reasonably organic, but are still pretty removed from the original. And therefore don’t necessarily feel collaborative in the way that Paul clearly wants.
So that’s the negative case. On the positive side of the ledger are two points, one of which is pretty simple and the other a bit more complicated.
The simple argument is that it’s a nice song. I don’t love it, but it’s nice to listen to. The studio wizardry works well enough. Paul’s imitation of George in the guitar solo is great. Where the two 90s tracks sounded very much of the 90s, this one does indeed feel a bit more timeless. It’s a nice song.
The more complicated argument has to do with the role of nostalgia. Which makes sense because so much of what we Beatles fans do is driven by nostalgia. For many of us, it’s not even nostalgia for a time that we ourselves remember. I was born after John was murdered (and it’s not like I’m even particularly young). So my nostalgia isn’t for something I lived personally but instead for the idea of The Beatles as a living and breathing thing.
But the core nostalgia in this song isn’t even the fans’ nostalgia. More than anything, it’s about Paul’s own nostalgia. You can hear it clearly in this:
When we were in the studio, we had John’s voice in our ears, so you could imagine he was just in the next room in a vocal booth or something, and we were just working with him again, so it was joyful.
Just like the fans (and let’s remember that Paul himself might be the single biggest Beatles fan on earth), he just…wanted to hear John sing one more song.
It’s also compounded by the fact that Now and Then is literally a song about nostalgia. We’ll never know for sure who John was writing to, but I don’t think it’s particularly unreasonable for Paul to feel that it was him. And that once John was taken away, that made it Paul’s responsibility to bring the song to life.
I think that’s ultimately what rescues it for me. It would be one thing if it were a money grab (which, let’s be honest, the first Anthology project absolutely was—at least for George and to a lesser extent Ringo). But Paul is a billionaire. He doesn’t need any of this. He doesn’t keep making records and touring in his 80s for the money. Not that he’ll turn the money down of course, but it’s not the point. Mostly he just can’t stop himself from humming songs, and can’t stop wanting to share them with the world.
In this case, I think that ever since he heard that incredibly rough demo back in 1994, he’s had a version of this song rattling around in his mind. He then spent three decades wanting to share it, but there was no technology on hand to turn the dream into a living thing. Now that the technology has arrived, and now that he is surely closing in on the last stages of his own career, he wanted to give it a go.
The heart wants what it wants, but it’s not always wise to give the heart the things it demands
Human beings are difficult. We want things that contradict, and we want them in ways that often leave us unsatisfied.
We want closure. We want stories with satisfying endings, which clean up the loose ends and send everyone home happy. But most stories aren’t neat and tidy. And trying to force clarity onto the human experience makes it artificial.
But we also want stories that remain open. We want reboots of TV shows that we loved. We want sequels to novels or films that we love. We experience something intoxicating and immediately want to chase that feeling again. And again.
The Beatles had one of the most satisfying conclusions to their story that you could ever imagine. They went out on an unbelievable high note, with what’s quite possibly the best album in the history of popular music. Which literally ends with a song called The End. What more could anyone possibly want?
Well, we aren’t satisfied with the perfect ending, of course. We want more. And we’ve spent half a century discussing and debating what could have happened. Looking for bootlegs and demos. Hoping that someday we’ll get to hear Carnival of Light. Constructing our own hypothetical Beatles albums of the early 70s. Wishing that someone out there might discover a tape of their session with Ringo when they all backed Lou Walters at the Akustic Studio in 1960. And yes, dreaming that we might someday get the full version of Now and Then.
But we also know that this restless search for more and more information is fruitless. There will always be unanswered questions, unresolved tensions. And that’s good. It would be entirely unsatisfying to get everything. The mystery is part of what makes a thing exciting.
That’s why I was a pretty strong resister of Now and Then when it first released. I didn’t hate the idea of the project. I just felt…disconnected from the motivation. It seemed to me that this song would never meet my expectations, and that I’d be disappointed in the effort. That maybe it would be better to leave the past in the past. So I gave it a few listens, enough to satisfy my curiosity, but then mostly ignored it.
It was only when I settled on doing this project, and decided that I’d include the three new songs, that I went back and really dug in. And I’m happy that I did. Because I’m increasingly able to hear this through Paul’s ears. It’s not essential. It’ll never be one of my favorites. But I think I’m glad it exists. If only for Paul’s sake.