This week, the Beatles, a band that broke up before Watergate, disco, punk, Star Wars, MTV, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, will release a new song. “Little Girl” is a John Lennon home demo from the Rubber Soul era, recorded in 1965 and apparently unknown outside the Lennon estate until this summer. Producer Giles Martin says Sean Lennon passed along the tape almost casually, as one of those things where somebody says, “Oh, and then there’s this.”
Every Gen Xer with boomer parents knows the cheerful announcement that several boxes of “family treasures” have resurfaced, which usually means old tax returns and copies of National Geographic. But your dad wasn’t a Beatle. Paul McCartney told Mojo in 2023 that “Now and Then” had been sitting in a cupboard. Every so often, he’d open it up and think, “There’s a new song in there, y’know,” and then close it again. He said this as if all homes contain a cabinet of dormant Beatles songs beside the tea and digestive biscuits.