That damn British invasion from 1964 is still rippling almost 59 years after The Beatles hit the American shores, dropping onto the Ed Sullivan Show in February of that year. 

They took over a country that was reeling from the assassination of our 35th President in November of 1963 and helped lighten the mood for people who were shocked and saddened by a senseless act. I don't want to wax too sentimental here, but this little diddy of a story hits me right in the feels when I have articles like this I have written lately, The Writing Is on the Wall: America Likely to Be Hit Because of the Invasion From Mexico, and it reminds me of that time way back when.

Now I'm just going to get it out of the way here at the beginning that I have been a Beatles fan since right around the time of the age when I was six or seven years old. When a young Duke would come home from kindergarten or first grade—I can't exactly remember—a Beatles cartoon would air on channel 20 right around 3:00 p.m. every day. 

I would sit downstairs in our living room a couple of feet away from the 20-inch color TV and watch a cartoon where all sorts of Beatles music would be played, and I was fascinated. My mom and dad, God rest their souls, would sit and shake their heads and abject horror. 

My dad was an admirer of Frank Sinatra and the crooner era, while my mom was a huge Elvis fan, and I'm sure they both sat down and wondered what happened to their eldest child listening to the mop tops from Liverpool.

So being such a huge fan, I was geeked when the remaining Beatles, nicknamed The Threetles, reunited in 1994 to finish off some John Lennon songs that he had failed to complete before his tragic death in 1980. 

I was hyped to listen to those.

The Beatles did not just complete the unfinished Lennon songs, but they released a new bevy of music with different takes of some of our favorite songs and got a whole new perspective on the band that only the bootleggers with a lot of money had heard.

The three unfinished songs that Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, gave Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr to work with were called "Free as a Bird," "Real Love," and "Now and Then."

All of the original Lennon recordings were done on a tape recorder while he was fiddling around on a piano at home just to lay down a guide track for him to work on in the studio. If you are around in the late 70s, you know that a tape recorder was awesome for taking notes and maybe recording your favorite song next to the speaker on your radio, but that was about it. They were not made to be used as a main track for a professional song, some 15 to 17 years later.

Of those three songs that were worked on for the Anthology project, only "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" made the cut. George Harrison was famously quoted as saying that the third song, "Now and Then," sounded like rubbish, which in its original form, it did.

Yet "Now and Then" languished until 2022, even though the technology had somewhat improved to the point that people 10 to 12 years ago were laying down what they thought it would have sounded like if the three remaining Beatles had completed it during the Anthology sessions.

Here is a sample.

That version was done 12 years ago.

Well, now the remaining Beatles have released a short film about how this final Beatles recording came to be, and it is right here. If you want to watch the whole thing, I suggest you do it, but if you want to hear how Lennon's voice was cleared up from a sub-par recording from the late 70s, go right to the seven-minute mark.

Peter Jackson, who also worked on the Beatles "Get Back" project for Disney, was the one who developed the ability to strip away the piano and background noise to hone in on John's voice alone.

Even though Harrison thought it was rubbish back in 1995, they did have some of his guitar work on the song, and along with McCartney and Starr adding their parts, they have the final Beatles song that will have all four members together for the last time.

Everybody has their go-to songs or groups to perk them up when they're down or just play as background music for certain seasons in their life.

The Beatles have served that purpose for me for almost 50 years of my life. They have brought me up when I had been down, and inevitably every phase of my life has a Beatles song that can serve as the soundtrack for that period.

I’m thankful for that and for them.