The John Lennon song rejected from The Beatles Anthology
Any hope for a Beatles reunion was snuffed out when John Lennon was murdered. Although each member had gone their separate ways since the late 1960s, there would be no true Beatles reunion without ‘The Intellectual Beatle’ at the helm. Lennon was working on new music up until his death, though, and some diamonds in his solo catalogue ended up receiving a posthumous release.
After the sunshine of his final album Double Fantasy, Yoko Ono returned to her collaborative project with Lennon for the album Milk and Honey. Most of the album’s material comprises songs from Lennon’s leftovers, which centres around Lennon embracing life outside his apartment in New York City, like ‘Stepping Out’, for example. Though each of these songs were beautiful on their own, Ono thought there was something about ‘Grow Old With Me’ that had Beatles potential.
Lennon had envisioned this song as a piece perfect for a wedding, with Ono remarking later: “‘Grow Old With Me’ was one that would be a standard, the kind that they would play in church every time a couple gets married”.
As much as Lennon wanted to take proper care of the song for Double Fantasy, it was shelved for Milk and Honey, as Ono remembers, “we were working against a deadline for the Christmas release of the album, kept holding ‘Grow Old With Me’ to the end, and finally decided it was better to leave the song for Milk And Honey so we won’t do a rush job”.
When Lennon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Ono discussed getting the surviving Beatles back together with Paul McCartney to work on some of Lennon’s final demos. Complete with a retrospective of their previous work, The Beatles Anthology would feature some of the first new material from The Beatles, with McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr working with producer Jeff Lynne on the songs ‘Real Love’ and ‘Free as a Bird’.
After the fantastic reception to the first singles, Ono suggested that ‘The Threetles’ use ‘Grow Old With Me’ as a potential third single to work on for the album. As McCartney discussed it during the Anthology, though, he thought that getting the final track would have been laborious and “John’s original demo required too much work”.
There were also remnants of a song called ‘Now and Then’ that was discussed, but Harrison pushed back on working on any more new material. Though McCartney was onboard, he understood why the rest of the band didn’t want to milk it, telling Beatles Monthly (via 100 Best Beatles Songs), “There was only one of us who didn’t want to do it. It would have meant a lot of hard work, the song would have needed a lot of re-writing and people would have had to be very patient with us”.
While there are still demos that could have easily been made into Beatles tracks, McCartney preferred to remember the good times, remembering how joyous it was working with Lennon from beyond the grave, loving ‘Free as a Bird’ because “John hadn’t finished it. On the middle eight he was just blocking out lyrics that he didn’t have yet. That meant we had to come up with something and that now I was actually working with John”.
Despite The Beatles’ version of ‘Grow Old With Me’ being lost to history, Ono eventually had Beatles producer George Martin add a string arrangement to Lennon’s demo. Although Lennon was known for his cynical side occasionally, this remains one of the purest statements of devotion he ever made.
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