The Beatles Should Have Let ‘Now and Then’ Be

During their actual time together as a recording unit—a period lasting only seven years—the Beatles were never a band who had to manufacture a moment. It was as if the moments presented themselves, and the Beatles said, “Right, we’ll have that,” and have it they did.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney each had their distinct genius for songwriting, but the collective as a whole possessed a genius for timing. In the 1982 documentary The Compleat Beatles, producer George Martin, sounding both humbled and sagacious, opined that someone else chose that timing on their behalf. Who—or what—did the selecting scarcely matters, though; what does is that the Beatles were able to absorb and redistribute all that happened around them as though they prefigured it.

But that was then and this is now, as we are reminded by both the title and the contents of what has been billed as both the new and the last Beatles song, “Now and Then.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.