Now and Then, the final single released by the Beatles on Thursday, isn’t one of the band’s best songs.
I know this because I had to rank it on my every original Beatles song, ranked list after hearing the song drop, and it was the most gut-wrenching thing to do.
Because after listening to the new song with all four of the bandmates playing, you might be like me and be in a puddle of tears.
There’s John Lennon’s voice, clear as it’s been in decades thanks to the AI technology Peter Jackson used for Get Back. Paul McCartney’s voice — still strong for a man at 81 years old who still tours, but worn with age — is right there with his. George Harrison’s guitars are front and center, and Ringo Starr’s drumming is dependable as it ever was.
And Lennon et al are singing about missing, and about things that happened now and then, and all about starting again.
Between thinking about Lennon’s senseless murder and Harrison’s death at 58 years old, along with what this band gave to the world … well, so what if the lyrics are so simple? So what if it didn’t reach the heights the band climbed to in their career? By the time you hit the bridge with its slide guitar solo and classic Beatles three-part harmony, it just doesn’t matter.
It’s a gift we should cherish. It’s one where you pause and think about what the Beatles meant and continue to mean, what might have been if they were all alive and the calls for them to reunite got infinitely louder on social media, or — the one we all play out in our brains — if they really had gotten together to record again one more time.
It’s an unfinished finished song, and that makes the most sense. Every ending the Beatles ever gave us never felt right — from “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make” to the unresolved chord left open on Her Majesty to the two Anthology singles we got in the 1990s. We always wanted more, we did get a little bit more, but it was never enough.
A simple song, with a simple nugget of a message — an ethereal, sorrowful coda to take with us as we say a full goodbye to the band that changed it all.