"Now and Then" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 2 November 2023. Dubbed "the last Beatles song", it appeared on a double A-side single, paired with a new stereo remix of the band's first single, "Love Me Do" (1962), with the two serving as "bookends" to the band's history. The song is included on the expanded re-issue of the 1973 compilation 1967–1970, released on 10 November 2023. On this day, the single reached number one on the UK Singles Chart. "Now and Then" originated as a ballad that John Lennon wrote and recorded around 1977 as a solo home demo but left unfinished. After Lennon's death in 1980, the song was considered as a potential third Beatles reunion single for their 1995–1996 retrospective project The Beatles Anthology, following "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", both based on two other Lennon demos of the same names. Instead, due to production difficulties, it was shelved for nearly three decades, until it was completed by his surviving bandmates Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, using overdubs and guitar tracks by George Harrison (who died in 2001) from the abandoned 1995 sessions. The final version features additional lyrics by McCartney. Lennon's voice was extracted from the demo using the machine learning–assisted audio restoration technology commissioned by Peter Jackson for his 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back. Jackson also directed the music video for "Now and Then". The song received widespread acclaim from critics, who felt it was a worthy finale for the Beatles. It topped the charts in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Austria, and reached the top ten in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. It is the only Beatles UK number-one single not attributed to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. The song was first performed live by McCartney on 1 October 2024 as part of his Got Back tour at the Estadio Centenario of Montevideo. "Now and Then" won Best Rock Performance and was nominated for Record of the Year in the 67th Annual Grammy Awards.
Composition and history John Lennon wrote "Now and Then" in the late 1970s, and recorded a five-minute piano demo around 1977 on a tape recorder at his home at the Dakota in New York City. The lyrics are typical of the apologetic love songs that Lennon wrote in the latter half of his career. For the most part the verses were nearly complete, though there are still a few lines that Lennon did not flesh out on the demo tape performance. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Lennon's song "a wispy, melancholy ballad". Referring to the original demo, Craig Jenkins of Vulture said, "'Now and Then' languished in an unfinished state, its vocal and piano melodies enshrouded in too dense a thicket of abrasively scratchy hiss to massage into the high-quality recordings the Beatles were known for".
Beatles' first version with Harrison In January 1994, the year Lennon was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his widow, Yoko Ono, gave Paul McCartney two cassette tapes she had previously mentioned to George Harrison. The tapes, which both had a note on them reading "For Paul", included home recordings of songs that Lennon had never completed and/or released commercially, two of them on one tape being the eventually completed and released "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love". The two other songs on the other tape were "Grow Old with Me" and "Now and Then". "Grow Old with Me" had already been released in 1984 on the posthumous album Milk and Honey, so the Beatles turned their attention to "Now and Then". In March 1995, the three surviving Beatles began to work on it by recording a rough backing track that was to be used as an overdub. It included acoustic guitars played by McCartney and Harrison, a rough drum track by Ringo Starr, an electric guitar by Harrison, and a bass and "a few synth [things]" played by McCartney." However, after several days of recording, all work on the song ceased and plans for a third reunion single were scrapped.
Producer Jeff Lynne reported that sessions for "Now and Then" actually consisted only of "one day – one afternoon, really – messing with it. The song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn't finish". Additional factors behind scrapping the song were that the piano Lennon was playing on during his demo recording was noisy, which kept drowning out Lennon's vocals, as well as a technical defect in the original recording. As with "Real Love", a 60-Hz mains hum can be heard throughout the demo recording. However, it was noticeably louder on "Now and Then", making it considerably more difficult to remove. The project was largely shelved because of Harrison's dislike of the song due to its low-quality recording. McCartney later stated that Harrison called Lennon's demo recording "fucking rubbish". McCartney told Q magazine in 1997 that "George didn't like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn't do it." Some such as Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer later speculated that, given Harrison had said "Apart from the quality, which was worse than the other two ['Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love'], I didn't think ['Now and Then'] was much of a song", he might have been critical of the song itself and not merely the recording quality. When the Beatles released their version of the song in 2023, Harrison's widow Olivia issued a press release stating: "George felt the technical issues with the demo were insurmountable and concluded that it was not possible to finish the track to a high enough standard. If he were here today, Dhani and I know he would have wholeheartedly joined Paul and Ringo in completing the recording of 'Now and Then.'"
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