Now And Then was a demo of John Lennon’s that the remaining Beatles worked on back in 1995, trying to make a new Beatles song out of it as they had with his demos for Free As A Bird and Real Love. After a struggle with his poorly recorded worktape, they gave up as the sound quality was so terrible. That was then.

Flash forward to now. Sir Paul McCartney announced the other day that thanks to the wonders of AI, they’ve been able to clean up John’s demo and extricate the vocal in order to finish the song, and it will be released later this year. He didn’t specifically say that the song was Now And Then, but it seems the most likely choice.

This raises so many questions.

*Is George Harrison on the new song? If so, with vocals and guitar work, or just on guitar?

*Is the song, in fact, Now And Then?

*Will this be the teaser for a new album or video release, such as Anthology 4, or perhaps Let It Be (the restored BluRay) or something else?

Who knows. Time will tell.

Going back to then. The original point of this Night Thread was to show you the notes I recently found for a nonfiction book I hoped to write covering the solo Beatles years. Here’s the first page. Notice the color coordination with the notes, and the state of the art dot matrix printer from 1985, composed on my Apple IIc which was the first computer I owned.

It never happened, but it’s cool, looking over the notes and remembering all the work I put into them. I also found notes I made for videotaping Live Aid—who would be performing when. I still have the sound recordings which I made from those. What a day that was.

So there you have it. Now And Then. Happy Night Threading!