The Beatles remain perhaps the most successful and beloved musical act of all time. It makes sense, then, that if anyone were to learn that the group was working on new material, it would immediately become headline news and ruin a surprise that was yet to be formally announced. Now that the band has released its new single, Paul McCartney has also detailed how they managed to keep the track a secret for what turned out to be a long time.
The two remaining Beatles—McCartney and Ringo Starr—released what’s being labeled the band’s last song, “Now and Then,” on November 2. The tune had been a major topic of interest in the entertainment world for months since its announcement in mid-2023, and only after the single debuted was one of its architects able to share the tricks he had to pull to keep word from getting out.
The session musicians who lent their talents to “Now and Then” played for the recording without realizing it was for The Beatles. The string section for the song was recorded at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles in May of 2022, yet the musicians were kept in the dark regarding the true nature of the project.
McCartney detailed the clandestine operation in the short documentary titled Now and Then – The Last Beatles Song, which was released just before the song arrived. McCartney shared, “We had to put the music out on the stands for the musicians, but we couldn’t tell them it was a new Beatles song.” He joked that the whole thing was “all a bit hush-hush” and that if anyone asked, “We pretended it was just something of mine.”
“Now and Then” had humble beginnings as a demo crafted by John Lennon back in 1977. Unfortunately, Lennon’s untimely death left the song unfinished, and the remaining Beatles were unable to complete it once they were gifted the recording by Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono due to the recording’s quality limitations. The song remained in a state of suspended animation for decades.
Renowned filmmaker Peter Jackson introduced cutting-edge technology that utilized artificial intelligence to enhance and clean up specific aspects of recordings, which he used when making his docuseries Get Back about the band. This technological innovation enabled the two surviving Beatles to finally complete Lennon’s long-lost demo, bringing it to life in a way that would have been impossible with the original recording.
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