“Now and Then”arrives like a gift from that glorious Abbey Road in the sky on Thursday — despite the fact that John Lennon and George Harrison died in 1980 and 2001, respectively, leaving surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to finish the long-buried track on the right side of the dirt.And if you think that it’s the result of some magical mystery trickery of AI defiling the sacred ground that is the Beatles back catalog, thankfully, you’d be wrong.While “the last Beatles song” certainly benefits from advancements in technology that allowed it to finally be released — five decades after Lennon wrote and recorded the demo at his Dakota residence on New York’s Central Park West in the ’70s — “Now and Then” is a real Beatles tune that feels like it somehow got stuck in some mop-topped time warp before the “Imagine” singer was murdered in 1980.
It’s a nostalgic trip back to the Baby Boomer glory days of yesteryear. Make no mistake about it — this is a song for those of a certain age who are yearning more for “Then” than “Now.”And let’s be honest, there are many of us — from the Baby Boomer generation and beyond — who have never been touched by a band in the same way that The Beatles did from the moment we first heard them.
For those masses across the globe, “Now and Then” is a revelation — like hearing old, dear friends who came back from the dead sounding as vital as we remembered them in our heart of hearts.It’s a wistful ballad that takes on even more layers of longing when you think that it’s John Motherf – – king Lennon, sounding — through the miracles of the same technology that allowed director Peter Jackson to isolate vocals and instruments in the 2021 Beatles documentary “Get Out” — like he’s alive and.
Read more on nypost.com