Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music With all the hoopla around “Now and Then” — which has been officially billed as “The Last Beatles Song” and erroneously described as the legendary group’s “first new song in 50 years” — some reality-checking is in order.
Yes, it is a “new” Beatles song in that all four members, including the late John Lennon and George Harrison, play and sing on a previously unreleased composition.
But it is not some long-lost “Abbey Road” outtake (those were all exhumed long ago), and in reality even Lennon’s part was recorded and presumably written many years after the Beatles broke up. “Now and Then” has a similar provenance as “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” the other two “new” Beatles songs to have been released since 1970: All are rough Lennon home demos recorded during the late 1970s and provided by his wife Yoko Ono in 1994 for the surviving members to complete.
The songs were intended for the three-volume “Beatles Anthology” outtakes collection (and accompanying long-form video) released in 1995 and ’96.
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