Giles Martin on Producing the Beatles’ ‘Now and Then,’ Remixing the Red and Blue Albums, and How Technology Is Enabling a Mass Emotional Experience

Christmas has come early for Beatles fans… who fortunately have been granted a week between gifts, so they don’t have to choose which to unwrap first. There was Thursday’s release, of course, of the newsmaking “Now and Then” single, a track that features the late John Lennon and George Harrison that was recently completed by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, with Martin on board as McCartney’s co-producer. Following a week later, only slightly in the new song’s shadow, are new iterations of the “1962-66” and “1967-70” collections that came out in the early ’70s, featuring dozens of tracks newly remixed by Martin to be heard in modern stereo or Dolby Atmos.

Martin, the son of original Beatles producer George Martin, addressed both projects in a wide-ranging interview with Variety this week. In helping create the new versions of the “Red” and “Blue” hits sets, he well knew these were no mere greatest-hits collections for many fans, but an important part of many Beatlemaniacs’ lives in their own right. And his remixes on the early ’60s tracks prove that the same Peter Jackson-associated extraction technology that made the completion of “Now and Then” possible is also what is allowing all those dozens of favorite songs to come alive, anew. (The following Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.) Merry Beatles-mas.