I’m pretty sure the first music I heard when I was really young was the Beatles. It was probably Sgt. Pepper’s or the White Album, those were the two my dad played the most. Strange to think that, at the time, those albums were only a few years old.

Of course I got into other music as I got older but I would later have kids of my own and my oldest daughter is a bit of a Beatles fanatic so that music has come around in our house all over again. I even learned to play “If I Fell” on the guitar so we could sing it as a duet.

So it’s sort of a big deal that the Beatles released a new song today based on an old tape of John Lennon given to the other members by Yoko Ono. If that story sounds familiar it’s because the surviving Beatles did all of this back in the mid-90s. That’s when they got the tapes from Yoko of songs John had recorded in his New York apartment. They turned two of those into finished songs with some help from Jeff Lynne of ELO (who was part of the Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison around this time). You may remember this one.

They did the same with another song called Real Love. There was a third song demo on a cassette called “Now and Then” and the three surviving Beatles wanted to make something of it but the quality of the recording was pretty bad. There was a buzz on the tape and Lennon’s voice was sometimes overtaken by the piano. In 1995 they gave up thinking it couldn’t be done.

But technology has improved since then. In particular, filmmaker Peter Jackson had created a new AI audio process for his documentary “Get Back,” (which I wrote about here). Jackson’s team were able to train their software to recognize Lennon’s voice and then extract that from the cassette tape minus the buzz and the piano. And that meant the two surviving Beatles could now go back and finish the song in the studio. Yesterday they posted this 12 minute film describing the whole story. In 21 hours it has been viewed almost 2 million times.

And earlier this morning they released the song itself.

It’s nice to hear John’s voice again. This song has a similar melancholy feel to Free as a Bird, which I guess makes sense. They were both probably written around the same time. But as a song, I don’t think it’s as strong as the previous two. I’m not sure if Jeff Lynne worked on this but it feels a little less polished than the previous two released in 1995. It’s not underproduced. There’s a whole orchestra backing them up. It just doesn’t contain any real surprises. The Washington Post published a review.

I sit, a committed Beatles fan, listening to this “new” song for the 10th time on headphones in the dark at 4:13 a.m., willing myself to feel that special thing that would allow me to embrace it, to rave to you about its majestic beauty and poignant perfection.

But I can’t. “Now and Then” is just okay. And that’s not nearly good enough…

“Now and Then” is not terrible. It starts slow and picks up a little as the rhythm section kicks in. There is a minor-key melancholy in Lennon’s composition. But ultimately, it’s kind of mundane.

That’s kind of how I hear it too. John clearly wrote some of the Beatles best songs (too many to list really), but not everything he wrote was a classic. Or maybe this just needed John working on it a bit more and singing with passion instead of softly-singing into a tape deck so he didn’t forget the words and the tune.

Bottom line, this melancholy tune wasn’t meant to be the Beatles final song and it probably doesn’t stand up to that level of scrutiny. It’s a footnote on a great career. “Free as a Bird” was probably a better send off for the band but it just didn’t work out that way. And you can’t blame Paul for wanting to finish the effort. Better to have it done than not have it done.

Just listen to some of the Beatles in their prime, anything off Sgt. Peppers or the White Album for example, and that’s really their legacy. And if you want something that sums it up with a bit of hindsight, the two songs George Harrison wrote about the band in the 80s and 90s are still the best. This first one was about John Lennon specifically.

And this one was about the Beatles as a whole.