The Beatles won a best rock performance Grammy in February for “Now and Then”
The Beatles may have broken up in 1970, but they’re still rocking on.
In February, the group won a Grammy Award for best rock performance for “Now and Then,” a demo recorded by John Lennon that got a second life thanks to Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and artificial intelligence technology.
“I didn’t expect to win, but it was great,” Starr, 84, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue of taking home the Grammy. “It just felt like John was with us.”
The track beat out songs from The Black Keys, Green Day, Idles, Pearl Jam and St. Vincent for the win.
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“Now and Then” originated as a ballad written and recorded by John Lennon in the late 1970s. Though he recorded a demo, he never finished it — and in 1994, his widow Yoko Ono shared it with Starr, McCartney and George Harrison as they worked on what would become the Beatles Anthology project.
Though the trio worked on the song and completed a rough mix, the sound quality on Lennon’s vocals wasn’t up to snuff, and the song was ultimately shelved. Enter Peter Jackson. After the director used technology to help with the 2021 release of The Beatles: Get Back docuseries, he realized he could use similar advances to pull Lennon’s vocals from the demo.
With the late star’s voice now ready to go, Starr and McCartney completed the song, with Starr playing a new drum part to accompany the guitar Harrison recorded in 1995. The track was released in November 2023, and touted as “the last Beatles song.”
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Meanwhile, Starr also has plenty of new material. In January, he released the album Look Up, his second country record after 1970’s Beaucoups of Blues. To celebrate, he performed a pair of star-studded shows at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, which are now streaming on Paramount+ as part of a two-hour concert special called Ringo & Friends at the Ryman.
Though he has plenty of new songs to choose from, Starr did, of course, include some Beatles hits on the setlist, including “With a Little Help from My Friends.”
“We put in a lot of hard work and a lot of emotion, and the tracks are still holding up today,” he says of the group’s enduring classics.
For more on Ringo Starr, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.
