The complexity of love and loss in the Beatles’ “Now and Then”

“One, two…,” counts Paul McCartney, but he is not about to launch into a rollicking, “Well, she was just seventeen! You know what I mean!” This McCartney count-in is more methodical, of lower timbre, cut off before he can reach the full count of four. This count-in marks the start of the Beatles’ newest and final single, “Now and Then,” released on November 2, 2023.

“Now and Then” single cover (2023) (Courtesy of Ed Ruscha, the Beatles, Universal Music Group)

How remarkably well-thought-out for McCartney to count in the last Beatles release sixty years after he counted in their first (“I Saw Her Standing There,” track 1 on Please Please Me (1963)). The very first second of this new song inspires a warm sense of nostalgia in any Beatles fan; those who were there during the first wave have the unexpected surprise of a new release fifty years after the band broke up, and those who were not yet alive get to experience rushing to the record store for a brand-new Beatles single at least once in their lifetime. Yet, the purpose of McCartney’s count-in serves a deeper purpose than alluding to the band’s prior, fresh-faced sound. How utterly devastating it is that the final count-in is cut off at two instead of at four, speaking to the huge losses the band incurred with the deaths of John Lennon in 1980 and George Harrison in 2001. The nostalgia factor is intimately twined with the fact that it was these losses that made this final Beatles release so important for McCartney and Ringo Starr to finish.

“Now and Then” is heavy with the passage of time, the rich overdub of Lennon’s piano dragging feet weighted with lead. There are few Beatles songs so openly haunted, but then again, there are few Beatles songs that have withstood the test of tragedy. Even the Beatles songs that hurt, speaking of pain and grief, have an airiness to them, whether it be in guitar, strings, or the youthful tenor vocals of sixties-era Lennon and McCartney. “I’m So Tired” was mournful, but could have flown away on the accompaniment of its fragile acoustic guitar, and “Eleanor Rigby” spoke of wasted life while its spiraling string arrangement lifted it out of the metaphorical gutter. “Now and Then” follows in the latter’s footsteps, with its intense string arrangement and reuse of the song’s original backing vocals, but unlike “Eleanor Rigby,” it does not have the privilege of stemming from a fictional scripted tragedy. “Eleanor Rigby” is the young playwright’s idea of what makes a story worth mourning for while “Now and Then” takes a tragedy the world has been mourning for over forty years and weaves that hollowness into its production. The chest-aching feeling of “what-if” is inescapable.

What sets “Now and Then” so far apart from any Beatles song prior is the prevalence of age in Paul McCartney’s voice. He once hovered comfortably in a pure tenor range whilst singing alongside Lennon, their close, youthful harmonies something that would come to define the Beatle sound. In the present, his voice is gravelly, weathered from a lifetime of pushing it to its five-octave limit. McCartney’s aged vocals provide the track with its most haunting quality– hearing a young Lennon, who always sang in a tenor just a hare lower than McCartney’s, matching the tone the present-day McCartney sings in. If this repurposing of the close harmonic style was solely focused on the juxtaposition of present and past, it would have run the risk of coming across cheesy, but as McCartney’s voice weaves in and out of Lennon’s original vocals, the only thing that strikes the listener is how it sounds like they were meant to be together in the first place. If Lennon and McCartney can sing together, separated by forty years of history, and still be inherently, harmonically in-sync with one another, then what would the world have gotten if…? The contrast between nostalgia and mourning continues as the comfort of hearing the world’s most famous songwriting duo reunited is undercut by the knowledge that Lennon’s voice is now nothing more than a digital ghost. 

Paul McCartney in “The Beatles Anthology” (1995) (via Peter Jackson, ABC, the Beatles)

This is not to say that “Now and Then” is hollow in the sense that it lacks substance; the very heart of the song is love, pure and unabashed. In every frame of the accompanying “Now and Then” documentary showing McCartney’s work on the track, a doe-eyed warmth radiates from his face as he mouths the words to the song, Lennon’s last gift to him, a faraway look of remembrance that has not changed in the twenty years since he first started working on the track. It’s as though McCartney hung up a worn-out coat half a century ago, and thought about getting it out of the cupboard and patching it up every day since. 

It may be fair to say that McCartney is at the very heart of the song– his inescapable energy and drive for perfection has not slowed a bit since we saw a sixties-era version of him in Peter Jackson’s Get Back (2021). Those familiar with his methodology may chuckle when present-day McCartney says he thought he could lay down a better bassline for “Now and Then” than he had in the nineties, then stop dead as they watch him, laser-focused, play a muted melodic bassline that calls achingly to the past. It’s both heartwarming and hilariously on-the-nose that he overdubs a slide guitar solo in the style of George Harrison despite Harrison not being present– after all, didn’t Harrison briefly leave the band because of this domineering attitude during the Get Back sessions? It turns sobering when McCartney asks to hear the original demo (allegedly left with a note on the tape – “For Paul”) so he can painstakingly recreate Lennon’s piano part– how must it feel to be the one man who has the tools to recreate the unique sound of friends long since passed? McCartney is the world’s greatest mimic in the sense that when he takes something, he always returns it overflowing with love; for his friends, for music, for the delight of creation. 

Paul McCartney and John Lennon in the “Now & Then” music video (2023) (via Peter Jackson, the Beatles)

For McCartney to spend nearly two decades of his life attempting to bring Lennon’s last song into full fruition speaks to the boundless love he fosters for his former partner. The chorus of the song, “Now and then / I miss you / Oh, now and then / I want you to be there for me / Always to return to me,” is such an intimate confession of loss and love that it naturally invokes the feelings of reminiscing on old friends, and perhaps most importantly, of the bond between Lennon and McCartney. It is a bond emphasized in every piece of music they co-authored, in every piece of media ever made about the history of the Beatles, in the additions McCartney made to Lennon’s original lyrics and the way both Giles Martin and Ringo Starr discuss how important this track was for McCartney to finish. “Now and Then” has an iron-enforced closure hidden under its flourishes. At the root of it, the world’s greatest songwriting team see eye-to-eye with each other once more through song, separated only by the passage of time.

The fact that the world got to hear the final Beatles song in 2023, sixty years after the band’s first hit single is astounding. To think there are past Beatles fans who’ll never get to hear their last single, to think there are some that have lived the whole cycle is astounding. To think that one can get on a bus and hear two twenty-something young men impassionately discussing the logistics of “Now and Then,” then stare out the back window at the same route they always take while listening to a brand-new Beatles release on the day it came out, not on a 45 record, but on a portable smartphone is astounding. To see the band featured on Spotify’s new release playlist alongside artists like Megan Thee Stallion and Jung Kook is beyond surreal; to see that people still care enough about a band from the 1960s for a new release by them to hit #1 on music charts worldwide is even more so. “Now and Then” speaks to the longevity of the Beatles, and the fact that their legacy can never quite be condensed down into something rooted “in the past.”

It has been fifty-four years since “The End,” a song nearly unanimously agreed upon by fans and historians to be the true “last song” of the Beatles, was featured on Abbey Road (1969). It has been fifty-four years since Paul McCartney sang the Beatles’ famous last words: “And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make,” speaking to the sense of love that persisted within the band right up until the very end. “Now and Then” takes the love and finality found in “The End,” but time has separated it from the bitter tensions plaguing the band during the making of Abbey Road, mellowing it out into something both aged and brand-new. It has been fifty-four years, and now “The End” is no longer the unofficial end to the Beatles saga– there is finally another song, thought-out decades into the future, that gives the world’s longest musical love affair the cultivated end it deserves.

Article by Gianna Caudillo