Now that we’ve had a couple weeks to digest it, we can confidently say that “Now and Then” isn’t bad. It’s wistful, pleasant, and more affecting than its tepid opener might suggest. Is it a lost Beatles classic? Heavens no, it’s not even an upper-tier John Lennon track (likely why it never got past the demo stage in his lifetime). When it appeared on the vinyl reissue of Greatest Hits 1967-1970 just last week, it made for an underwhelming fit, especially compared to the likes of “I Am The Walrus” or “Hey Jude” (though it pairs just fine with the even schmaltzier “Long and Winding Road”). The song is nice, but not a masterpiece.
Of course, the main chatter about this song has been the sheer fact that it exists at all. Originally intended for inclusion on the ‘90s Anthologies alongside fellow Lennon demos “Real Love” and “Free as a Bird,” there was too much cassette-tape static to make the vocals usable—that is, till our latest buzzword AI finally extracted Lennon’s voice enough for Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to harmonize over it, as well as overlay a George Harrison guitar solo he originally recorded for it clear back in 1995.
That is, half the people featured on this track are long dead.
The music video, too, deploys advanced video editing software to seamlessly integrate old footage of John and George into the song’s modern day performance. Once the wow factor wears off, however, one is left feeling even more melancholy than ever, because this impressive technology does not presage more reunion material to come, but only underscores just how incontrovertibly dead these two men really are. Paul McCartney’s thousand-yard stare at various points in the video does not appear to be affectation.
Yet still that desire to bring back the dead remains strong within us, no matter how long ago we completed the grieving process. It creeps up every Halloween and Day of the Dead (on which day the song debuted), and during all of our Ghosts of Christmas Past (coming up), and the Easter season after that—not to mention all our LDS Temple ceremonies and genealogy work and the burial shroud placed over our Sacramental emblems and so forth.
We all instinctively want our dead back, and will go to immense technological lengths to at least mimic them, even as we all intuitively understand how futile even our most advanced efforts are, how pitifully they all fall short. The song “Now and Then,” pretty though it may be, isn’t truly by the Beatles, but only the ghosts of the Beatles, as salvaged by two former members who are soon to join them. The redemption of both the dead and the living remains beyond our mortal powers, and all things must fail. At the end of the day, we still desperately need that 2,000 year old Atonement, infinite and eternal, then as now.