The Beatles was a band formed in the ’60s that quickly became extremely popular. To this day, they are still loved by many and recently have released their newest song titled “Now and Then”. It was released on November 2nd, 2023 and will be their last song released as a band ever. Even if you are not a Beatles fan, the process of creating this new song is fascinating and worth looking into.
It came as a surprise when “Now and Then” was released and officially announced as the last Beatle’s song as at this point the band had been broken up for several years. The lyrics for the song itself were written, sung, and recorded by John Lennon who had passed away many years prior to the song’s release. Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, was the one to give the recording of “Now and Then” to the other band members as stated in the short film titled The Beatles – Now and Then – The Last Beatles Song released on The Beatles Official YouTube channel.
The demo that John Lennon recorded was accompanied by his playing of the piano; Paul McCartney stated in the previously mentioned short film, “We didn’t have the technology to do the separation,” in reference to the vocals and piano. Because of this, the song could not be released when the other band members first received it, thus causing the song to take almost 50 years to be announced to the public (including the time before the Beatles got the recording). Now 50 years is an incredibly long time to create and release a song, but it only took so long because there wasn’t the right technology to be able to do the separation required back when they received it.
Fast forward to the present day, technology has significantly improved and it is now possible to fix up the original audio and put together “Now and Then”. In order to make this happen, they used technology developed by Peter Jackson, initially developed for Get Back, to separate John Lennon’s voice from the piano. Next was to put together the song. George Harrison died back in 2001 but the rest of the Beatles, now only Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, had kept the original guitar part played by George Harrison. “We had kept George’s Guitar parts from ‘95 and what I thought what I’d like to do is do a slide guitar solo in George’s style,” stated Paul McCartney in the short. Now, they could finally really make and release “Now and Then”.
The entire process of creating the song “Now and Then” is incredible and shows just how much technology has advanced. Although The Beatles will never do something like this again, nor release another song altogether, it’s cool to think about what could be achieved through similar techniques in the future.
