The Beatles’ new song, the final entry in their extraordinary songbook to be released in November, is a thing of beauty. Titled “Now and Then,” it reminds us, above all else, that the narrative of the Beatles is a love story. And as with the finest romances, it is chockful of buoyant beginnings — think about Beatlemania and the world falling in love at first sight with the Fab Four — and heartbreaking endings. As I remind my students every fall during my introductory Beatles course, the band’s story is unfailingly true. There are moments of unparalleled genius, to be sure, but they are bookended by instances of unflinching reality. One Beatle will be the victim of a senseless murder, the other suffering an untimely death.
“In the end,” Lewis Carroll wrote in the twilight of his own life, “We only regret the chances we didn’t take, the relationships we were afraid to have, and the decisions we waited too long to make.” As John Lennon’s most persistent literary muse, Carroll knew a thing or two about loss, one of the most constant themes in the Beatles' vast songwriterly corpus. Working at his piano in the Dakota in 1977, Lennon concocted “Now and Then,” a deceptively hopeful paean about love and our inherent despair over the possibility of losing it. For Lennon, the demo marked one of his first stabs at the composition. A nearby television, along with a buzzing sound, can be heard in the background.
