Now and Then… and then again

I’m predicting more new “last-ever Beatle songs” coming down the line. This ‘new’ Beatles song “Now and Then” was constructed on computers from a tape that Lennon made while he was basically just fucking around. There are hours and hours of these “lost” snippets in the Beatle vaults. There is even a podcast dedicated to them, called “Almost Beatle Songs”. McCartney, Giles Martin, or even Ringo or Yoko, could take any of these snippets and use computer AI and product an entire album’s worth of “new” songs.

This latest new song “Now and Then” (similar to the last new Beatles song “Free as a Bird”) sounds just like a Paul McCartney song that is trying to be a Beatles song — and using samples of John Lennon’s voice in it.

The song itself is easy to listen to, but it’s also easy to dismiss. Like most commercial music today, it is soulless. But the catch here is that McCartney and producer Giles Martin attempt to inject soul into the song by exploiting Lennon’s 1978 tape of himself singing at a piano. The result is a song that is very plastic. It’s plastic soul, or should I say Rubber Soul!

The thing that this song most obviously lacks is the magical chemistry that took place when John, Paul, George, and Ringo were face to face, side by side, all together, jamming in a studio or dicking around with their instruments. That was the magic of the Beatles, not some soulless piecemeal, bleeps and bloops constructed by AI-manipulated computer programs. This song is not an authentic Beatles song in any sense of the word. In fact, it’s the opposite — it represents everything that is fake in the music-making industry today. Just give me some truth!

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