The untold story behind the last Beatles song

Paul McCartney may be the only person on Earth who believes the Beatles have any unfinished business in 2023. For years, McCartney fixated upon “Now and Then,” a song John Lennon sketched in the late 1970s that the surviving Beatles attempted to complete in the mid-1990s when they were searching for new material to supplement their long-gestating documentary, “Anthology.” Thanks to machine learning techniques developed by a technical team led by Peter Jackson, the director who helmed 2021’s multipart Beatles documentary “Get Back,” McCartney and Ringo Starr, the other surviving band member, received the opportunity to finish “Now and Then” in the past year. Nevertheless, the melody of “Now and Then” has an underlying poignancy, which might be the reason it was among the four unfinished Lennon songs his widow Yoko Ono gave to the surviving Beatles when they were seeking additional material for “Anthology.” After rejecting “Grow Old With Me,” which had appeared on Lennon’s posthumous “Milk and Honey,” the Beatles chose to pursue “Free as a Bird” and “Now and Then,” partially because they contained the genesis of a song that McCartney and Harrison could shape into a finished tune. Working with Jeff Lynne, the Electric Light Orchestra leader who performed with Harrison in the Traveling Wilburys and produced his 1987 comeback “Cloud Nine,” the Beatles managed to finish “Free as a Bird,” fleshing out Lennon’s song with a bridge and slathering it with harmonies designed to conjure collective memories. Back in 1994, McCartney bristled at Harrison playing slide guitar on “Free as a Bird” — “I thought, oh, it’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ again” — so there’s some measure of irony that Paul replicates every one of George’s slide signatures on the “Now and Then” solo.