It is out, finally: after all the hype, listeners can judge for themselves what the so called “new Beatles single” is like. Now And Then isn’t actually “new”; it comes for an old demo John Lennon left behind among many others, and like practically everything about the historic band and Lennon, it was already well known.
This new version was elaborated by Paul McCartney with the help of an AI software to isolate Lennon’s voice from the background, thus “cleaning” the sound and recovering the intensity of the artist killed in New York in December 1980.
Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, in the ‘90s gave the three remaining Beatles some Lennon tapes from the end of the ‘70s. In the month of February 1995, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr went back to the recording studio for the project The Beatles Anthology and they used some unpublished Lennon material, but the Now And Then demo was left out because of its poor sound quality.
Almost 30 years later, McCartney and Starr – Harrison having also passed on – gave new life to the song. The words “new Beatles song” would be enough to make a hit of it, but its plaintive melody and John Lennon’s voice make for an emotional listening – a memory from a glorious past.
