A new Beatles song leads us to imagine
The Beatles, foreground from left, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr on drums perform on the CBS "Ed Sullivan Show" in New York on Feb. 9, 1964. Credit: AP
And now for some good news: The Beatles are releasing a new song this week.
Just writing those words creates a little shiver, the good kind, the kind of tingling that accompanies a heady frisson of anticipation that also makes the heart skip a metaphorical beat.
The track is called "Now and Then" and from the purported lyrics I've seen online, it seems like it will be a lovely little love song. And who couldn't use some of that right now. The Beatles were once masters of that subgenre. One finds oneself hoping to hear that magic again.
But then there's that title. Elusive, isn't it? Open to interpretation. Malleable. Capable of conjuring other thoughts.
Now and Then.
It's a compelling juxtaposition.
"Then" was more than 40 years ago when John Lennon wrote the song and recorded it on tape with a backing piano, something bandmate Paul McCartney called "a ropey little bit of cassette."
"Now" is the era of artificial intelligence, which director Peter Jackson used to separate John's voice from the piano and give Paul and Ringo Starr a pure vocal under which they layered a guitar part recorded by George Harrison nearly three decades ago, new instrument tracks from Paul and Ringo, some strings, and backing vocals from three songs from the Beatles' heyday. Say what you will about the dark possibilities of AI, but there is plenty of light in this technological transformation if it can bring the Fab Four alive one more time.
"Then" was the late 1970s when John made the recording in the apartment he shared with Yoko Ono on the seventh floor of the Dakota building in New York City, not long before he was killed outside that same building by a deranged man with a gun.
"Now" is the nightmarish echo of that evening, Dec. 8, 1980, playing out with awful, gruesome, percussive regularity as men with mental health issues and guns continue to destroy lives and dreams and rob us and the world of who knows what potential was to come. More than half the U.S. population was born after John died but even they understand the depth of this loss. But the rest of us felt it in our hearts and minds and the deepest pit of our gut.
"Then" was that same decade when John wrote "Imagine" and conjured a world with no countries and "nothing to kill or die for." A world in which all the people were living life in peace. A world he suspected would judge him as only a dreamer, but a world in which he also knew he was not alone. "I hope someday you'll join us," he sang, "and the world will be as one."
"Now" is our failure to meet that challenge. It is pointless war in Ukraine, and endless bloodshed in the Middle East. It is combat along so many borders, in so many lands, for so many reasons, causing so much harm. We fight in the real world and we fight online, against faceless enemies and those we know well, for reasons real and, yes, imagined. And it never stops. And it's utter agony because the answer to what ails us is known to all: Just learn to live together.
So I see the title of this new song and I smile and grimace, at almost the same instant. Because we live our lives in that shadowland between "Now" and "Then."
We measure ourselves by that contrast, if only subconsciously. We've come a long way in some ways, and are stuck in so many others.
"When we lost John, we knew that it was really over," Paul says in the trailer for the song's release.
That was then. This is now. A new Beatles song is upon us. Let us all imagine.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
