Given that The Beatles broke up in the 1970s, and that John Lennon and George Harrison have since passed away, the band hasn’t exactly been releasing a ton of new music in recent years. That’s actually about to change soon, though: “Now And Then,” which is being billed as “the last Beatles song,” is set to be released today (November 2). Ahead of that, yesterday, the band shared a short film looking at the making of the track.
The video runs for 12 minutes and it looks back at how the song came to be, a story that began in 1994, when Yoko Ono offered up a demo tape by Lennon to the surviving Beatles (Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Harrison at the time). From there, the film gets into more detail, creating a timeline of what happened between 1994 and present day.
McCartney previously said of the song, “[Peter Jackson] was able to extricate [John Lennon’s] voice from a ropey little bit of cassette. We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar’ So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI. Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do. So it gives you some sort of leeway. We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year.”
As for what the song will sound like, BBC notes, “The original demo has circulated as a bootleg for years. An apologetic love song, it’s fairly typical of John Lennon’s solo output of the 1970s — in a similar vein to ‘Jealous Guy.’”
Check out the short film above.