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Thirty years after it was first released, The Beatles’ multimedia Anthology project — a career-spanning documentary, a glossy coffee-table book, three behind-the-scenes rarities albums — will be getting the deluxe reissue treatment this fall, Apple Corps Ltd. announced Thursday.
Apple also dropped a new track to whet fans’ appetites: a “demixed” version of the 1995 reunion single “Free as a Bird” with crystal-clear vocals from John Lennon.
What else are the Beatles adding to their expanded Anthology? Here’s everything we know so far.
Available now on major streaming services, the “2025 mix” of “Free as a Bird” uses the same advanced demixing technology that allowed the surviving Beatles — in collaboration with Giles Martin, the son of their 1960s producer, George Martin — to finish off a long-lost third reunion track, “Now and Then,” and release it in late 2023.
This version of “Free as a Bird” has been a long time coming. In 1975, Lennon retreated from the music scene to raise his newborn son, Sean. But he never stopped writing and demoing songs at his home in New York City's Dakota Building. While many of Lennon's final compositions eventually appeared — in polished studio form — on his 1980 comeback album with wife Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy, and their posthumous 1984 collection, Milk and Honey, a handful remained in Ono's vault.
“Free as a Bird” was one of them.
On January 19, 1994 — some time after George Harrison and longtime Beatles' sidekick Neil Aspinall reportedly pitched Ono on the idea of fleshing out Lennon's unreleased demos with full-band instrumentation and vocals — Ono gave McCartney two cassette tapes.
One featured "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love," two late Lennon demos that the surviving Beatles (aka The Threetles) ultimately "finished off" during 1994 and 1995 reunion sessions at Paul McCartney's home studio in Sussex, England, and released as part of the sprawling 1995-1996 Beatles Anthology project.
"It's the end of the line, really," Ringo Starr said at the time. "There's nothing more we can do as the Beatles."
That, of course, turned out to be not quite true. Back in 1994 and 1995, producer Jeff Lynne and his team used existing technology to iron out problems with pitch, timing and noise on Lennon’s tapes, but his vocals on the original Anthology versions of “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” still sounded ghostly and distant — like they were recorded on a primitive cassette player.
But for “Now and Then” — a third Lennon demo that McCartney, Starr and Harrison worked on for two days in March 1995, then abandoned — Martin took advantage of a machine-assisted learning program developed by director Peter Jackson's team and recently used on other Beatles projects to isolate, clarify and remix individual voices and instruments.
The result? A much sharper Lennon vocal than on "Free as a Bird" or "Real Love.”
The 2025 version of “Free as a Bird” benefits from the same technology (as well as a new, punchier mix by Lynne). Artificial intelligence is involved, but this isn’t a fake robot Lennon that had been generated from existing audio data and programmed to "sing."
Instead, as McCartney told BBC's Radio 4 Today program in June 2023, "[Jackson] was able to extricate John's voice from a ropey little bit of cassette. We had John's voice and a piano, and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, 'That's the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’ [So] we were able to take John's voice and get it pure through this AI so that then we can mix the record, as you would normally do."
The original “Free as a Bird” music video has been restored as well.
It’s not out yet — and we don’t know exactly when it will be — but the Beatles have also prepped a demixed version of “Real Love,” the other Threetles reunion single. The expanded Anthology albums are slated for release on Nov. 21; “Real Love” could come out earlier, as another preview track, or it could be withheld for release day.
The original Anthology set consisted of 155 rare demos, studio outtakes and live cuts spread across three double albums. The idea was to provide “insight into the early development of songs that became the [Beatles’] recorded masterpieces,” as Apple put it Thursday.
Now they’re adding a fourth installment.
“Curated” by Martin, Anthology 4 features an additional 36 Beatles rarities. Twenty-three of them have already seen the light of day on earlier “super deluxe” reissues of the band’s studio albums.
But 13 Anthology 4 tracks have never been officially released, until now.
They include new outtakes of “If I Fell,” “In My Life,” “Nowhere Man,” “Hey Bulldog” and “All You Need Is Love.” Here’s the complete list of previously unreleased material:
"Tell Me Why" (Takes 4 and 5)
"If I Fell" (Take 11)
"Matchbox" (Take 1)
"Every Little Thing" (Takes 6 and 7)
"I Need You" (Take 1)
"I’ve Just Seen A Face" (Take 3)
"In My Life" (Take 1)
"Nowhere Man" (First version – Take 2)
"Baby, You’re A Rich Man" (Takes 11 and 12)
"All You Need Is Love" (Rehearsal for BBC broadcast)
"The Fool On The Hill" (Take 5 — Instrumental)
"I Am The Walrus" (Take 19 — strings, brass, clarinet overdub)
"Hey Bulldog" (Take 4 — instrumental)
"Free As A Bird" (2025 mix)
"Real Love" (2025 mix)
“Now and Then” will also appear on Anthology 4.
According to Apple, all existing Anthology material has been “remastered” by Martin as well.
That sounds like standard practice, but it’s likely to amount to something much more substantial. Why? Because Jackson’s machine-assisted learning program has the power to clean up and clarify all of the embryonic Beatles recordings on Anthology 1 in particular — including their very early, very noisy demos, taped while they were still teenage amateurs in Liverpool.
The original Anthology documentary was an eight-part series that eschewed the usual talking-heads approach in favor of letting John, Paul, George and Ringo tell their own story, in their own words.
Now there’s a ninth episode.
According to Apple, the new installment includes “unseen behind-the-scenes footage of Paul, George and Ringo coming together between 1994 and 1995 to work on ‘The Anthology’ and reflec[t] on their shared life as The Beatles.”
The entire documentary has been restored and remastered as well, with the help of Jackson’s Wingnut Films & Park Road Post teams. Never before available in digital form, it starts streaming on Disney+ on Nov. 26.
The Anthology book — 368 pages illustrated with more than 1,300 photos, documents and other memorabilia from the band’s archives — will be republished on Oct. 14.
