Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’: How Paul McCartney’s White Whale Became Their Last Song
It’s often hard to fathom, but Paul McCartney is a mere mortal, just like the rest of us. Even with all the breathtaking highs of a life lived almost completely in the spotlight for 60-plus years, he’s also sustained crushing lows. He lost his mother to breast cancer as a teenager, as well as his first wife, Linda, in 1998. One of his oldest friends, his Beatles bandmate George Harrison, also succumbed to cancer in 2001, and, of course, John Lennon was assassinated in 1980. Through it all, it seems to have been music that has kept the almost preternaturally optimistic McCartney going.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that the new Beatles song being released this week—the “last Beatles song,” as the press keeps reminding us—comes from a plaintive Lennon home demo, and is a McCartney production tour de force in which he and Ringo Starr pay homage to Lennon and Harrison, while wrapping an elegant bow on the band’s legacy.
It’s been a long and winding road, to say the least, for the song, which is titled “Now and Then” and was recorded circa 1979 in Lennon’s New York City apartment. In 1994 and ’95, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr convened with producer Jeff Lynne to tackle four songs that Yoko Ono had included on a cassette she first offered to Harrison and then passed on to McCartney on the night he inducted Lennon into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.