When the Beatles came out with a new song on November 2nd, I, like many others, was pretty hyped, as I have always been a fan of the band and their work. Others, however, were understandably confused: How could a song come out from a band that broke up nearly 50 years ago and has only two living members? The answer, believe it or not, is Peter Jackson. But before we get to him, we have to go back . . .

. . . all the way to 1974. At this point, the Beatles had broken up for good, punctuated only by brief, sporadic collaborations between two or three members that were more cameos in the global musical scene than any real songwriting effort. For the next few years, John Lennon spent most of his days in NYC with his wife Yoko and his son Sean, tinkering around with songs that never got to be played by the full band. After Lennon’s murder in 1980, Yoko gave tapes of these unfinished songs to the remaining Beatles, hopeful that they would be able to complete them and bring closure to Lennon’s legacy. Of the four songs on the tapes, two (“Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”) were successfully supplemented by the rest of the band and released as part of the Anthologies project, and another (“Grow Old with Me”) had already been finished by Lennon and posthumously released. The last, however, proved to be a bit trickier to work with. “Now and Then” seemed promising, but complicating matters was the fact that Lennon himself never finished his part. Tack on the fact that the audio quality was heavily corrupted, and the project was quickly abandoned, deemed impossible to faithfully recover.

That is, until 2022. Peter Jackson had finished production on his documentary about (and named after) the Beatles’ Get Back project, and in the process, learned a thing or two about using machine-assisted learning (MAL) to restore decades-old audio of questionable quality. When he offered the extant Beatles the opportunity to have another shot at “Now and Then,” they jumped at the chance. Jackson, using a less-corrupted file that Sean had recovered, plugged Lennon’s audio into his MAL software, and in the blink of an eye, John Lennon was practically in the room with the team, playing on his piano without a care in the world. Filled with a second wind, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr got down to work. Though George Harrison had passed from cancer in 2001, his earlier work on the group’s first crack at the song proved to be enough to see the project through to completion. After a year of off-again, on-again recording, overlaying, and production of a backing track performed by a string section that McCartney was able to wrangle, the song was completed and released. The last work that all four Beatles were able to collaborate on. The last true Beatles song.

Despite “Now and Then” being such a pivotal moment in Beatles history, reactions to the song were mixed. While many lauded the melancholy, wistful work as a fitting end to a band that both achieved and lost so much, others weren’t so enthusiastic. Many thought that the song didn’t even hold a candle to some of the Beatles’ top hits, with others claiming that the significant alterations to the original demo tape, like cutting out the piano bridge in Lennon’s signature digressional style, made the song feel too bland and repetitive, losing the signature Beatles feel that Lennon was so easily able to convey. While these are certainly valid criticisms of a far-from perfect song, I personally feel that they miss the bigger picture. It doesn’t matter what “Now and Then” is comprised of; it simply matters that it exists in the first place. It is the last project that the Beatles were ever able to work on together, finally released after 50 years of a dubious and uncertain future. It brings closure to the most popular band of all time in a way that no halfhearted reunion or collab could ever hope to do. This power to be a fond farewell to the Beatles and their amazing work is why, despite its flaws, I consider “Now and Then” to be one of the greatest Beatles songs ever made.

P.S. In case you wanted to have a listen for yourself, here’s the official music video.