“New” Beatles Song ‘Now and Then’ Is a Touching Tribute to John and George, Even If The Visuals Look Bad

Over 50 years after the band broke up, there is a new Beatles song out today. Sort of. It even comes with a new Beatles music video—though some fans may wish it didn’t.

The song, “Now and Then,” was one of several unfinished songs written by John Lennon before his murder in 1980, which his wife Yoko Ono gave to the remaining Beatles after his death. In a 12-minute documentary short about the new song, Now and Then: The Last Beatles Song—which is now streaming on Disney+—Paul McCartney explains that “Now and Then” was one of Lennon’s song that he, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr attempted to finish in the ’90s, as part of the 1995 documentary series The Beatles Anthology. Two other songs, based on demos recorded by Lennon, were released with that documentary series: “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.”

The audio for Lennon’s voice on the demo of “Now and Then” was too faint to make it work as a Beatles song, so the other Beatles gave up on releasing it at the time. Then Harrison died of cancer in 2001, it felt like the Beatles were over for good. Then director Peter Jackson and his team invented a unique way of restoring and separating the old Beatles audio tracks, while he was working on the 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back. With that technology, they were able to separate John’s vocals on the track. McCartney and Starr provided additional vocals, as well as playing bass and drums. Though Harrison wasn’t around to play guitar, McCartney says in the Now and Then doc that he played the parts written by Harrison in ’95 “in George’s style.”

The song is a dreamy, bittersweet, nostalgic piece, with similar vibes to “Free as a Bird.” But it’s hard to focus on just the music, because “Now and Then” also comes with a new Beatles music video, which you can watch below.

The video, which was also directed and produced by Peter Jackson, starts off as a heartfelt tribute to Lennon and Harrison. Sure, there is a bizarre image of Lennon in silhouette looking at an image of the younger Beatles superimposed over a sunset, but it’s nice to see the archival footage of Lennon and Harrison from the old days. We do miss them. It’s sweet.

Things get a little weird when the video cuts to a modern-day Starr and McCartney singing their vocals side-by-side, because it’s fairly obvious that Starr is standing in front of a green screen in Los Angeles, rather than standing in the same room with McCartney at Abbey Road Studios. But the worst part is when Jackson adds in video cut-outs of Lennon and Harrison “playing” along with Starr and McCartney.

It’s just odd! The footage of Harrison and Lennon looks to be from around the Magical Mystery Tour era—from the Hello Goodbye promotional video the Beatles made in ’67— but I’d much rather just see a clip from that original video than see this strange, doctored version. It doesn’t look good, and it’s distracting. It looks like it was made by an enthusiastic amateur fan, not an Oscar-winning Hollywood director. Release the original footage, Jackson!

Oh, well. It’s not the first time the Beatles have collaborated on a bad visual project. (Yellow Submarine still haunts me.) Beatles fans will have to forgive Jackson for this transgression, considering he is the man who restored hours of invaluable, archival Beatles footage and gifted it to us with a bow. At least you can watch the “Now and Then” video without paying for a streaming service. And even if the visual looks bad, it’s still a sweet tribute to Harrison and Lennon, the Beatles of then, from Starr and McCartney, the Beatles of now.