More than 50 years after the Beatles broke up, John, Paul, George and Ringo are back together, reunited for one final track that was released Thursday, officially closing the final chapter in the band’s musical output and legacy.
The song, titled “Now and Then,” was played on BBC radio just after 2 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET) and simultaneously released on streaming platforms. With the help of digital technology, it features both John Lennon, who was shot dead in 1980, and George Harrison, who died from lung cancer in 2001.
With new contributions from Paul McCartney, 81, and Ringo Starr, 83, the song will be the final music released by possibly the most influential and bestselling musical group of the 20th century.
Such is the enduring popularity of the band that some listeners complained on social media that the song appeared to glitch or stop entirely when played on the Spotify streaming platform.
“We listened to the track and there’s John in his apartment in New York City, banging away at his piano, doing a little demo,” McCartney said in a short BBC documentary film released Wednesday to mark the new song.
McCartney revealed in the film that he had second thoughts about using Lennon’s voice.
“Every time I thought like that I thought, wait a minute — let’s say I had the chance to ask John, ‘Hey John, would you like us to finish that last song of yours?’ I’m telling you, I know what the answer would have been ‘Yeah!’ He would have loved it,” he said.
McCartney delighted fans in June by announcing the final track was on the way, revealing that he was working with movie director Peter Jackson to isolate and enhance a low-quality cassette tape of John Lennon singing and playing piano in his New York apartment in the late 1970s.
The tape was passed on to the surviving Beatles members in 1994 by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, and featured the songs “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” which were both reworked by the surviving members, produced by Jeff Lynne and released as new songs in the 1990s as part of the retrospective “Anthology” album series.
“Now and Then” was considered as a single release in the 1990s, but the band “ran out of steam and time,” and the tune remained unfinished, McCartney said in the BBC film.
McCartney has previously said the song was rejected because Harrison didn’t like it. Nevertheless, the song features a typical Harrison slide guitar solo, which he recorded in 1995.
The song also features a string section conducted by Giles Martin, son of George Martin, who produced the Beatles’ albums.
Jackson used cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence tools, to restore hundreds of hours of grainy documentary footage of the band making the “Let It Be” album in 1969.
This became the acclaimed “The Beatles: Get Back” series on Disney+, which offered the band’s generations of fans an unprecedented glimpse into their creative process and at times fractious interpersonal relationships.
“With the technology that Peter Jackson and his team had worked out during the ‘Get Back’ movie, he’d been able to separate certain instruments and voices,” McCartney said, adding that he then sent the original cassette to Jackson to see if it could be restored.
“Since Peter took John off [the cassette] and gave him his own track, it’s like John’s there. It’s far out,” Starr said in the BBC documentary.
Sean Ono Lennon, John and Yoko’s son, told the BBC: “My dad would have loved that because he was never shy to experiment with recording technology. I think it’s really beautiful.”
“Now and Then” will be released as a double A-side single along with the band’s first single “Love Me Do,” which debuted to an unsuspecting British public in 1962.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
