If you are Paul McCartney on tour in 2025, how do you properly represent one of the greatest, most beloved songbooks in all of popular music while not seeming stuck in 1965?

How do you deal with the near-mythic status of the Beatles?

Simply put, how do you reconcile now and then?

With “Now and Then.”

Nineteen songs into Wednesday night’s tour de force at a full Smoothie King Center, McCartney arrived at “Now and Then.” Released in 2023, the “last Beatles single” originated as a John Lennon home cassette recording in the 1970s. McCartney, Ringo Starr and – during a first, ultimately abandoned attempt to flesh out the song in the 1990s – George Harrison completed it decades later.

During Wednesday’s performance of “Now and Then,” a video on the stage’s LED backdrop inserted the young

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