If you are a music fan you’ve probably heard the song by now. The final Beatles single was released earlier today.

The tune is pleasant enough, but I’m struggling with the band label attached to it. Just because each member of the Fab Four played on it doesn’t make it a Beatles tune to me.

You probably know the story. The Beatles broke up in 1970. John Lennon was murdered in 1980, which ended talk of future collaborations.

In 1994, Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, gave Paul McCartney three demo cassettes of songs that Lennon had recorded. McCartney worked on those songs, bringing in George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and two of the three showed up on a Beatles anthology collection.

On the third song, “Now and Then,” the piano pretty much drowned out Lennon’s vocals. The other band members couldn’t make it work, so they shelved the project.

Times and technology have changed. George Harrison has died in the interim, but now the technology exists to bring those drowned out vocals to life. That is what was released today, with Harrison’s guitar recorded I presume from the 1994 sessions. 

But is it really a Beatles record. I think not.

Yes, even when they were recording as a band, there were many times when they were not in the studio together. So the fact they never rehearsed the song or played it live doesn’t necessarily disqualify it.  There are lots of Beatles tunes that the band never played live. After all, they stopped touring in 1966.

But, even when they were recording their parts in the studio separately, there was interaction between the band members. You only have to look at the 2021 film Get Back (in the making of which director Peter Jackson developed the technology that made recovering Lennon’s vocals possible) to see how the band worked.

Songs would change and evolve as they bounced ideas off of each other. With two of the four band members dead, that couldn’t have happened this time. And who knows what changes Lennon would have made to his song – demos can sometimes bear no resemblance to the final version of a tune.

So no, this isn’t a new Beatles record despite the name on the virtual label. It is a John Lennon song where his former bandmates have made a guest appearance. Many Beatles fans won’t care – they are just happy to be able to hear the song.

I leave it to you to judge the finished product.