The tape moves geographically and through time, and John is therefore the character that is emerging out of it.”

So I like the idea that, if you watch this for the first time, the way it’s all teed up is that you go along on a journey with John’s tape. “They use music to Trojan-horse something else. “I think all the best music documentaries, they’re not really about music,” says Murray, whose film premiered Wednesday afternoon on the Beatles’ YouTube channel, BBC, Disney+, Apple TV+, and MAX. The 12-minute short film (which you can watch above) from director Oliver Murray tells the circuitous tale of this final farewell from the Beatles, from the recording of Lennon’s home demo to the “Threetles” sessions in 1994 and ’95 to McCartney-with help from Starr, co-producer Giles Martin, orchestrator Ben Foster, and filmmaker Peter Jackson-finishing the job in 2022. While that may not make immediate sense, especially to more casual fans, a new short film called Now and Then: The Last Beatles Song gives vital context to the track. In retrospect, considering the subject matter and arc of the songs, “Free As a Bird,” “Real Love,” and “Now and Then”-the song that’s haunted McCartney and that will finally hit streaming services tomorrow-are a perfect, final Beatles EP of sorts. With Harrison’s death in 2001, and the last of the band’s cynics gone, it was perhaps inevitable that McCartney would return to the song.

Blue Sky: The Story of Jeff Lynne & ELO, in which he said, “I’m going to nick in with Jeff and do it.

Still, McCartney brought it up repeatedly in interviews over the years-notably in the Martin Scorsese-directed Harrison documentary Living in the Material World, and in the 2012 doc Mr. He said he didn’t want to end up just being John Lennon’s backing band.” He was a real downer about it and said, ‘I wasn’t really interested.’ He said, ‘Apart from the quality, which was worse than the other two, I didn’t think it was much of a song.’ He made it clear he’d definitely called time on the whole thing. “I asked George, ‘What happened to the third song?’” Mark Cunningham, who was the technical musical consultant to the Beatles’ longtime press officer, Derek Taylor, recalled recently. In 1994 and ’95, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr convened with producer Jeff Lynne to tackle four songs that Yoko Ono had included on a cassette she first offered to Harrison and then passed on to McCartney on the night he inducted Lennon into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It’s been a long and winding road, to say the least, for the song, which is titled “Now and Then” and was recorded circa 1979 in Lennon’s New York City apartment. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the new Beatles song being released this week-the “last Beatles song,” as the press keeps reminding us-comes from a plaintive Lennon home demo, and is a McCartney production tour de force in which he and Ringo Starr pay homage to Lennon and Harrison, while wrapping an elegant bow on the band’s legacy. Through it all, it seems to have been music that has kept the almost preternaturally optimistic McCartney going. One of his oldest friends, his Beatles bandmate George Harrison, also succumbed to cancer in 2001, and, of course, John Lennon was assassinated in 1980. He lost his mother to breast cancer as a teenager, as well as his first wife, Linda, in 1998. Even with all the breathtaking highs of a life lived almost completely in the spotlight for 60-plus years, he’s also sustained crushing lows.

It’s often hard to fathom, but Paul McCartney is a mere mortal, just like the rest of us.

Photo session crossword