It could have been bad news had The Beatles’ “Now And Then,” regarded as the final song from the Fab Four, been snubbed by Grammy voters. So, their nomination for the 67th edition of the annual spectacle, once made official, thrilled everyone—Beatlemaniacs or regular fans—which generally includes the entire population of the Earth.
The Beatles earned Grammy nominations for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance when the nominees were revealed on Nov. 8.
Believe it or not, The Beatles have yet to win in the Record of the Year category. Their song is up against entries from the likes of Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, and Taylor Swift, who collaborated with Post Malone on a song called “Fortnight.” You’d probably see me grinning if any of these artists, should they win, refused to accept the trophy out of respect for the band that bagged the Best New Artist award in 1964—the same year “I Want to Hold Your Hand” failed to win Record of the Year, despite being the song that launched the group to America and the world.
For the Best Rock Performance award, The Beatles are facing strong competition, with both veterans Green Day and Pearl Jam also in the running.
History, though, is on the side of the quartet that won just seven Grammys out of 25 nominations. That’s few, if we’re talking about a group that changed popular music. Anyway, their reunion track “Free As A Bird,” partly made possible by advanced technology back in the ‘90s, won Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal at the 39th Grammys. The same song also won Best Music Video in both short and long forms.
Personally, I prefer the mood presented in “Real Love,” the unheralded piece among their reunion records. It’s more engagingly upbeat and sounds like it is celebrating what The Beatles accomplished in just seven years of recording activity during their heyday in the 1960s. “Now And Then” and “Free As A Bird” were slower in tempo and rather heavily pointed to lost times.
“Now And Then,” regardless of its touch of AI (Artificial Intelligence), emotionally connects much deeper than “Free As A Bird,” especially in the verses where John Lennon’s voice hauntingly cuts through—expressed by a man who may have felt he was going to die before his time and being grateful to people who helped him make it through amid the sad feeling he might not be around to enjoy the fruits of his labor.
“Now And Then” features Lennon’s taped demo of his composition from the late ‘70s, guitar work from George Harrison (who vetoed its inclusion in the Beatles Anthology project), and significant contributions from the surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. McCartney is said to have played the lead guitar in the style of Harrison as a nod to how they used to do things and did a count-in at the start of the record, the same as he did for “I Saw Her Standing There” or the first track on The Beatles’ first LP, Please Please Me.
The 2025 Grammy Awards will take place at the Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles, California, on Feb. 2.
As always, with everything they did—whether winning Best Performance By A Vocal Group in 1964 for their work on A Hard Day’s Night or crafting the conceptual project Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which won Album of the Year at the 10th Grammys—the world becomes a better place. In other words, nobody loses when The Beatles somehow pull off something.
