A Dance to the Music of Time — “Now and Then”

The Song: “Now and Then”
a 2023 single by the Beatles
reached #1 on the UK Singles Chart

for S/V

I’ve been saying goodbye a lot lately. None of them permanently, of course: most of them are just people who’ve left Hong Kong for other lands, in search of better opportunities and greater freedom. These days, I can call these people up whenever I want to — just a video call on WhatsApp, or a few taps on a phone, and they’re back by my side again in an instant. But the ache brought on by the huge physical distance is still there: nothing beats seeing the people you love in the flesh, gazing into their eyes, and annoying them with a few crap jokes.

I wonder how it is for Paul McCartney these days. His best friend these days is probably his wife Nancy, or maybe it’s a couple of people he’s met in a pub near Cavendish Avenue, or maybe some other person whose existence has been somehow kept under wraps. But once upon a time, his best friend lived just across a park in Liverpool, and they wrote amazing, breathtaking songs together on a daily basis, “eyeball to eyeball”, the necks of their guitars touching. Now they’re separated by a physical distance that, thanks to Mark David Chapman, is now insurmountable; and even though he’s had more than four decades to get over that loss, I don’t think he ever will. Hell, just looking at how much he brings out on tour that clip of Lennon and him singing “I’ve Got A Feeling” on that windswept rooftop in London, you know he’s still thinking about what might have been.

That’s what makes “Now and Then” such a heartbreaker in the first place: it’s a song about grief, about loss when it’s already happened. There was much ballyhoo about how they’d managed to clean up the old 1977 demo; Paul was full of enthusiasm about how the latest technology had managed to extract John Lennon’s voice from among the dead and clean it up for this latest single. But I don’t really hear much of a difference from the vocals of their first reunion; the only difference between the ghosts of John we encounter in “Free as a Bird” and “Now and Then” is that the latter sounds a little more presentable. But make no mistake: from the very first moment, when he intones that uncertain “I know it’s true/ It’s all because of you”, it already sounds like he’s trying to break free from the track and float back into the ether.

The result was that when I heard this song, the first thing I was reminded of was the fact that John Lennon was dead, that we had lost him forever. And that’s when I realised it: this was not Paul’s attempt to resurrect his old friend from the dead. It was to bury him, once and for all.

The whole song feels funereal. The Beatles were always an extremely major band, by which I mean the vast majority of their songs are in the major key: even songs that start out sad and depressed always turn out to have a silver lining (think “Wait” or “Old Brown Shoe”). But “Now and Then” is a song that wallows in the irrevocable past, one that’s shot through with regret; listening to it feels like walking through a dusty, old, and abandoned mansion, the furniture and paintings still in place — reminders of happier times, but all unreachable no matter how hard you try, because the people who brought it all to life just aren’t there anymore.

What all this means is that it’s not just John’s voice that sounds ghostly on the song; the whole thing feels like it’s a transmission from a far-off place, maybe even from beyond the Styx. Meanwhile on Earth, the mourners gather, and grieve: George’s acoustic guitar stately and solemn; Ringo’s drums a processional march. And Paul — well, Paul’s not so easy to contain, but his bass is also much more understated than most Beatle songs, so the spectre of John still takes centre stage, telling the world about the love he still has, while the three living members try to give him a proper send-off.

But it’s impossible to mourn forever, and all four of them know this. The funeral must end someday, and you move on — and by the time John wrote “Now and Then”, he and the other Beatles had done a lot of moving on; this is even more so the case in 2023, when two of the Fab Four are dead. The song itself acknowledges this: “and if you go away/ I know you’ll never stay”. So what do you do, faced with a here and now that’s empty, devoid of the people who made you smile the most in years gone by?

You remember them. You remember the things you did together and the good times both of you had, and most of all they remember what they mean to you. For the Beatles — especially John and Paul — it was all about making music, pouring their hearts out to the world and to each other. Which is why when McCartney’s voice slowly fades in towards the end of the first verse, it’s to join his old friend in saying that “I will love you”. Then with a crash of Ringo’s drums, it happens: the sonic gap between 1977 and 2023 is bridged, and John and Paul meet once more, and as the strings swell around them, they sing these words together:

“Now and then, I miss you
Oh, now and then, I want you to be there for me
Always to return to me”

It’s astonishingly simple and direct, and I get that a lot of people might be expecting more from the wordiest of the Beatles: given John’s wisdom in his later years, you’d have thought that he’d have something a little deeper, or at least special, for this occasion. But these lyrics hit right at the heart of the matter: it is a longing for each other’s company, an acknowledgement that without the other, they are nothing (as the song says elsewhere, “if I make it through/ It’s all because of you”); there is no deeper truth than this, a simple confession of longing and perhaps regret. With those lyrics, it’s not hard to see why McCartney was so dogged in his attempts to finish this song, so eager to have his vocals dance around Lennon’s; as Rob Sheffield said in his review yesterday, “only John could have lighted this fire in him”.

But at the same time, it’s not just an admission of longing. That’s just not the way these four, the poster boys of action and reaction, would have done it; they’d have allowed themselves to move on, after all that grief. And so there’s also an element of forgetting in the song, from the title onwards: after all, the lyric is “now and then, I miss you”. Even as Paul joins John in song, he knows that things have changed, that they’d drifted apart in the intervening years. Other people came into their lives — Linda, Yoko, Denny Laine — and they weren’t seeing or talking to each other much before that fateful night outside the Dakota. That’s what time and distance does to even the best of relationships: they slowly fade away into the background and you forget them, even though, all those years ago, you said that you wouldn’t.

This is why I say that this song is about burial: it’s Paul giving notice that he will move on and forget John, his friend of decades past, and asking for forgiveness in doing so. As the song continues, we briefly drop in on another verse before returning to the bridge, but this time, after the words “I want you to be there for me”, their voices fall away, and we are left soaring (or is it freefalling?) through the air — this time, Paul knows that “always to return to me” is too big of an ask, that the distance between the two of them is too great to be resolved by anything smaller than death. And so there is nothing to say — the track dissolves into Paul’s George-imitating guitar solo (his way of remembering his other departed friend, perhaps) and their little sighs, as they sing together one last time. They will sing about how much they need each other one last time, they will say goodbye — and then John will fade into nothingness once more, while the two surviving members will move on, free of his shadow at last.

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The day before “Now and Then” came out, one of my closest friends left town for good. I’d known for years that she was planning to leave, but I still found myself biting my lip when the door closed on her one last time and I realised that our friendship would be going into a new phase, slowly retreating into the background and maybe even worse. That reminded me of all the people who’d gone overseas these past couple of years, from acquaintances I barely knew to friends with whom I’d shared my deepest, darkest secrets. Ever so slowly, I’d lost touch with them, one by one; sometimes I’d be content to let them fade away, but I worried about the others: these were beautiful people. These people had coloured my life, made the world a better place. How could I so callously forget them, just like that?

“Now and Then”, like so many Lennon-McCartney(-Harrison-Starr) songs before it, provides a possible way out. This is a song that’s been repeatedly promoted as the finale to the Beatles story, but I don’t think that’s entirely right: the real ending, the one actively penned by all four Beatles, that had been written with “Real Love” all those years ago, where the chronology of Beatle song titles had circled right back to the word “Love” (as in “Love Me Do”) and begun anew. This is more of a coda: a sudden remembrance now of happy times back then, a spell of melancholia that commemorates that Beatle camaraderie without really bringing it back to life again.

Because you can’t bring it back to life again. You may try your damnedest to deny it, you may scream and shout against it every night, but that doesn’t change reality: they are gone — sometimes of their own choosing, sometimes not — and there is nothing you can do to bring them back. Separation is a natural and unstoppable part of life, and oftentimes endings will slip out of your grasp, and write themselves free of your authorial control, condemning you to a future without the people you love. That’s just the way life works.

That’s just the way life works.

But all those years of friendship fading away — it doesn’t mean that they never existed. Even if you can no longer see the friends you love (perhaps for ever), it doesn’t mean they’ve taken their impact on you away with them, just as Paul McCartney didn’t regress into a Little Richard impersonator the moment John Lennon left this earth. We’ll go on with our lives, separate but (mostly) improved, and meanwhile the best that you can do is to accept that you are human after all, and there WILL be moments where you forget these people. But from time to time, every now and then, your mind might just catch onto the faintest fragment of a memory, and then all at once you’ll be together again.

This is why “Now and Then”, despite basically being a footnote in Beatle history, is such the perfect song at this moment. I’ll admit that before I pressed play, I was worried — worried that they’d exhumed the pale, emaciated corpse of John Lennon, just to use him for another blatant cash-grab. But I should have known better than to distrust Paul McCartney and his sensitive ways: this is a song that respectfully inters him, and puts the whole story of John, Paul, George and Ringo to rest at last. In the process, it’s taught me a life lesson — a lesson I probably learnt years ago, but one that’s still valuable nonetheless. It’s an inevitable fact of life that we’ll grow apart, leave each other, forget each other even — but we all have lives to lead, and I’ll forever be grateful for the truly amazing times we had together. As a wise man once said: “step on the gas, and wipe that tear away — one sweet dream came true today”.

(Cover by Apple Records. “Now and Then”, performed by the Beatles and written by Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey, utilized for criticism and review purposes.)