THE BEATLES Now and Then | Their last song

Making good music in a band is all about chemistry. The way our four personalities combined in the Beatles was something very special. When we lost John, we knew it was all over. If we did anything, just the three of us, as interesting as it might be, John’s absence would weigh heavily.

In 1994, by surprise, the opportunity came up to do more music together. I was talking to Yoko and she said to me:

Oh, I think I’ve got a tape of John.

We were excited. A new John song, amazing! Hearing John’s voice is something we had to take advantage of and I’m sure he would have relished that opportunity to be together again.

George and Ringo came to my studio. Nice day. Fabulous. We listened to the recording. There was John in his flat in New York playing the piano, recording a demo.

Was it right for us to do that? But every time I hesitated it took me a minute. Let’s say I could ask John, ‘Hey, John, would you like us to finish your last song?‘ I’m telling you, I know the answer would have been yes, he would have loved it.

It was very strange when we started, because there were only three of us left after all those years, after all that life. We did ‘Free as a bird’ and ‘Real love’. When we started ‘Now and then’, it was very complicated because it was difficult to listen to John. And at that time, of course, we didn’t have the technology to isolate him. That really made it clear to all three of us that John was gone.

Then in 2001. We lost George, which kind of put the kibosh on us.

It took us almost a quarter of a century waiting for the right moment to pick up ‘Now and Then’. With the technology that Peter Jackson and his team had developed during ‘Get Back’, he had been able to isolate the instruments from the vocals. During the course of ‘Get Back’ we paid a lot of attention to technical restoration, which eventually led us to develop a technology that allowed us to take any audio and break it all down into different parts and separate tracks, with machine learning. We thought, ‘well, we need to send them John’s voice from the original cassette’.

A few seconds later, there it was, John’s crystal clear voice.

I know it’s true
it’s all because of you
and if I make it through
it’s all because of you

We could amplify John’s voice without bringing up the piano, which has been one of the problems. Now we could mix it and make a proper recording of it. I isolated it, listened to it and thought the bass could be a bit better, so why not start like that?

Ringo Starr said:

Paul rang me up and said he’d like to work on ‘Now and Then’. What do you think? I think it’s great. So he added the bass. He sent me the files. I put the drums in. That changed everything, you know, and now we had a track that was really starting to become a song.

I had a budding idea of doing something good with strings. The Beatles did a lot of things with strings. Strawberry Fields, Yesterday, I’m the Walrus. It was the thing to do. We had to tell the musicians that there was something new, but not a Beatles song. It was all discreet. We pretended it was nothing.

On the new record, there’s a guitar solo. We still had George’s guitars from ’95 and I thought what we could do was a slide guitar solo in George’s style. It was really a tribute to George.

Then we restarted the mix. Wow, this is it. Now it’s a Beatles song.

All those memories come flooding back. My God, how lucky I was to have those men in my life and to work with those men to create a piece of music.

Working on a Beatles song in 2023. Wow, we’re actually using state-of-the-art technology, which is something that would have appealed to The Beatles.

Paul McCartney