On This Day, Feb. 2, 2025…
The Beatles won the Grammy for best rock performance for “Now and Then.” Neither Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr, the two surviving members of the band, were on hand to accept the award.
It was The Beatles’ first Grammy win since 1997, when the group won for The Beatles Anthology and the single “Free As A Bird.” “Now and Then” was also nominated for record of the year, but it lost to Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us.”
Released in November 2024, “Now and Then,” promoted as The Beatles’ “final song,” featured vocals John Lennon recorded on a demo in the late ’70s. His wife, Yoko Ono, gave the three-song demo to McCartney, Starr and George Harrison in 1994. They then used it to create “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” which appeared on The Beatles Anthology project in the mid ’90s.
For “Now and Then,” new technology developed by director Peter Jackson helped extract Lennon’s vocals from the demo’s final track. Paul and Ringo completed the song in 2022 using guitar parts Harrison recorded in 1995.
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