With that said, the way I think of it, as with “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” the two latter-day tracks released in with the Beatles Anthology project in the 1990s: It’s not a song by the Beatles, but a song from the members of the Beatles: outside of the purview of the official canon and a melancholic coda to it instead. All four of the Beatles are here on the track (in addition to Lennon’s vocals, there’s a Harrison guitar track on it, from a shelved attempt at recording the song in the 1990s), which is more than some Beatles tracks from their actual tenure can say. On one hand, anyone’s opinion on this but Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the Lennon and Harrison estates’ is irrelevant if they say it’s a Beatles tune, it’s a Beatles tune. There’s some discussion of how much this song should be considered an actual Beatles tune, inasmuch as John Lennon and George Harrison are no longer with us, and the originating document of this is a tape recording of Lennon playing about at piano, framing out a song, well after the breakup of the Beatles, rather than anything that was created within the rubric of the band while it was an ongoing concern. As I noted on Bluesky just after it debuted: It’s a sketch.
