It’s exhausting on preliminary listens to “Now and Then” to not hear the know-how that went into the report relatively than the report itself. “Is that guitar strum George’s?” you would possibly surprise, making an attempt to guess how the elements had been assembled and when. This tendency to listen to the elements relatively than the completed product is bolstered by the character of the tune itself: It’s a tense, weak, minor-key quantity. Lennon was writing ballads like this on the finish of his life—the demo in all probability dates from 1979, and he was murdered the next 12 months—and a few of the higher ones wound up on two albums with Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy and the posthumous Milk and Honey. One imagines he was very a lot in a “non-Beatles” headspace by that point.
These Lennon ballads from the interval—“Lady,” “Watching the Wheels”—had been sung from the attitude of a man approaching 40 who had misplaced some toughness and was coming at music from a humbler place than he had within the first 15 years of his recording profession. And it’s barely unnerving listening to “Now and Then” now and listening to one thing so private and intimate blown up right into a super-sized Beatles observe, with strings and plenty of layers of backing voices. The proportions really feel off.
However over a number of listens, the backstory begins to fall away, and the tune as a complete sinks in. There’s a palpable craving to Lennon’s voice and melody, an ache derived from a separation that feels actual. And although it’s framed with sonic drama that turns that harm into theater, it really works fairly effectively on that stage. If Lennon’s demo is all about private ache and intimacy, then the absolutely produced Beatles’ model is a technicolor film created for IMAX screens that makes use of as its topic private ache and intimacy.
To my ear, “Now and Then” is the weakest of the posthumous singles. “Actual Love” has the perfect tune, one so melodic and ’50s-indebted that it’s potential to think about it as an precise Beatles tune. And “Free As a Hen” has the perfect manufacturing, as Jeff Lynne’s approximation of the Beatles sound correctly foregrounds Ringo’s drums; in case you squint a bit, you would think about it orbiting someplace within the neighborhood of Abbey Highway. “Now and Then” is just about unimaginable to think about as an precise Beatles tune, and it appears particularly removed from what may need been Lennon’s unique intention. And but, it’s pleasant simply the identical.
That’s one other a part of the Beatles’ magic: no matter cynicism one develops across the evils of the music trade and its fixed want for enlargement into new codecs, little of that negativity sticks to their output, although it’s generated by precisely the identical market forces. Maybe it has one thing to do with the band ending earlier than any of its members had reached the age of 30—they all the time appear to have the innocence of youth on their aspect, and I discover myself wanting to provide them the advantage of the doubt. In that spirit, right here’s one ultimate Beatles single, a tune that’s removed from nice however might have been so much worse—it was laid apart and left incomplete years in the past, and now it exists.
