The Beatles, ‘Now and Then’, review: John Lennon’s last hurrah is wonderful, nostalgic and still revolutionary

If someone had told you 20 years ago that just after lunch on a rainy October day in 2023 you would be listening to a new record by The Beatles, you may have been a little surprised. Yet here we are, speakers blasting a song by John Lennon, who died in 1980, whipped into shape with a little help from his friends – both his surviving bandmates and some obliging computer software. It makes you feel young, old, happy and sad all at the same time.

And with a project as strange and wonderful as this, it’s difficult to know where to begin. “Now and Then” was originally conceived by Lennon while he was bringing up his son with Yoko Ono in New York, and he recorded it as a demo to cassette in 1978. Yoko dug it out in 1994, and the three remaining Beatles attempted to revive it in Paul McCartney’s studio to release with two other new songs, “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love” – but on Lennon’s recording, the piano was too prominent over his vocal, so they abandoned it.

Now, with the use of cutting-edge technology developed during the making of Peter Jackson’s 2021 Beatles documentary Get Back, producers have been able to extract the vocal as a solo stem for McCartney and Ringo Starr to work around (George Harrison, who was part of the original restoration project, died in 2001). It was, Starr said, “the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room”.

And we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the results are glorious, both as a tribute to Lennon and a song in its own right. A wistful ballad about missing a past relationship, in typical Beatles style, it begins stripped back and then builds to bright, earthy choruses of piano, guitar, strings and harmonised vocals. As well as Lennon’s AI-engineered voice, there is a guitar solo comprising snippets recorded by Harrison in the 1995 sessions – so it feels like a real collaboration, despite only two of the band still being alive.

Its classic sound and slight graininess make the whole thing feel hyper-nostalgic, too – a song that could easily slot into the existing Beatles canon alongside similarly mellow songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”. This is helped by the content: “Now and then, I miss you/Now and then, I want you to be there for me”, “I know it’s true/It’s all because of you” – you can’t hear these words without thinking about the impact of Lennon on McCartney, and the impact the band’s music has had on so many people.

STRICT T's & C's 1967: The Beatles Image from https://press.thebeatles.com/pages/home.php — The Beatles at the launch party for the *Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band* album at Brian Epstein’s house in London on 19 May, 1967 (Photo: Apple Corps Ltd)

This only highlights the magnitude of this event, and makes it more powerful that technology has allowed these influences to continue – in fact, the questions it raises are a bit overwhelming. What is it that we should be thinking about when listening to “Now and Then”? The unbelievable potential that this new software brings to restore the voices of dead artists? The existential questions it raises, in conjunction with CGI projects like Abba Voyage, in terms of computers somehow prolonging human life? The addition of a new work to the Beatles canon, and the slightly altered fabric of their legacy? Or – plain and simple – the substance of the music, with its lilting chorus, and reminder of the uncomplicated genius of the Beatles’ pop-rock songwriting?

Each of these is a worthy line of inquiry. But listening to “Now and Then” in full, following the snippets many of us have heard on the run-up to the big release and in the short film about its production available on YouTube, it’s clear they are all inextricable from each other, bound in a tangle of emotion and awe and weirdness.

Perhaps the most emotional, awesome and weird thing of all is that, once you’ve processed the fact that the song opens with Lennon’s distinctive falsetto singing something you’ve never heard before, the finished song sounds completely natural – almost ordinary. Far from throwing us into some far-flung futuristic musical world, the winding minor-key melody and misty harmonies make you feel like you’re sinking back into a soothing hot bath of the 1960s.

Yet while the track is comforting and poignant, we should remind ourselves that the heart of the Beatles movement is almost the opposite of nostalgia: it was revolution, musical and social; less a hot bath and more a cold shower. And while the slightly melancholic, highly contextual sounds of “Now and Then” may feel dreamy and evocative, reminiscent of real people, we would do well to remember that it’s highly revolutionary in another way, in terms of its technology. That while it may sound familiar, it’s doing something entirely new.

Which is why it’s not so strange that you’re listening to it on Spotify, or that I’m writing about it on the internet. It’s also why, of course, it’s so very Beatles.