New York, NY (November 2, 2023)—Nearly five decades after John Lennon first recorded a rough demo of it into a cassette recorder, today The Beatles have released their last single of new music, “Now And Then.” The historic track was issued along with a 12-minute documentary, Now And Then—The Last Beatles Song, detailing how the song was recorded, languished in an un-releasable state for decades, and was finally completed using modern recording technology.
Briefly, Lennon recorded the song as a loose demo in his New York City living room sometime in the later 1970s; the cassette was given to the other Beatles in 1994 with the hopes that they could complete it and two other songs on the tape. Ultimately the other tracks, “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love,” were finished and released, but “Now And Then” was left incomplete for a variety of reasons, as extensively detailed here. Now the track has been completed and issued 29 years later.
Now And Then—The Last Beatles Song Documentary
The documentary, directed by Oliver Murray with sound design by Alastair Sirkett, provides insight into the song’s lengthy creation, merging both archival and current-day footage to tell its tale. Throughout, eagle-eyed, audio-minded viewers will spot the inside of Paul McCartney’s personal recording facility, Hog Hill Mill in East Sussex, England; in visuals from both 1995 and 2023, the studio’s 60-channel Neve VR60 V Series console figures prominently, while the 1995 footage also includes a brief nostalgic glimpse of Neve Flying Faders control software on a computer monitor.
Elsewhere in current-day material, the camera turns to Park Road Post Production, a film/TV post-production facility in the suburbs of Wellington, New Zealand, where film director Peter Jackson and his team used his company’s MAL software to extract Lennon’s voice from the original cassette recording. While the film makes a point of discussing the proprietary MAL technology, FabFilter’s Pro•Q3 plug-in is repeatedly featured onscreen, though without discussion of how it may have been applied, if at all.
The film also ventures to Capitol Studios in Hollywood, CA, where a string session featuring jazz violinist Charlie Bisharat of Shadowfax was recorded for the song. While not mentioned in the documentary, the session was completed just under the wire, as it was in fact the last recording done in the facility before the studio—and the rest of the Capitol Records tower—closed in the Spring of 2022 for a multi-year renovation and repair effort.
With the song’s release, the multi-decade odyssey to bring the final Beatles song to the world concludes on a high note.
