I sent this text to Dylan this morning just as we were spinning “Now and Then” by the Beatles for the first time, just after 7:30am:
Holy f***, dude. You just introduced a new Beatles song! 😭😭😭😭😭 Who would’ve thought that our generation of radio broadcasters would be doing that!!!! 🤯
It was certainly a pretty significant morning of music for our l’il station of radio nerds!
The eventful journey of the last song from The Beatles, “Now and Then” happened over five decades! It’s the product of conversations and collaborations between the four Beatles, that really went on to this day.
Since February of 1995, surviving Beatles, Paul, George and Ringo started working on this demo from John Lennon that Ringo received from Yoko Ono. This demo had been long mythologized. The work was to be part of The Beatles Anthology project, but it was never finished. The three of them recorded vocal harmonies and instrumentation but hit a bit of a dead end and had to scrap the project. This is, in part, due to the technical challenges around isolating Lennon’s vocals from a cassette tape recording that were blended with the piano that John was playing in his New York apartment.
Thanks to new recording technology developed by director, Peter Jackson, and his team of filmmakers (he directed the documentary series Get Back), they were able to separate the vocals and the piano! So the remaining Beatles, Paul and Ringo (George Harrison sadly passed in 2001), get together in the studio to put these pieces of the puzzle together!
ICYMI, the short film about this entire process can be played above. And you can listen to the new song right here:
