The Beatles released Anthology 1 in the United States on November 21, 1995. The compilation opened with “Free as a Bird,” a John Lennon home demo completed by Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr with producer Jeff Lynne. Across two CDs, that new collaboration sat alongside recordings tracing the band's early development, from the Quarrymen through its 1964 sessions.
Lennon had recorded “Free as a Bird” in 1977, singing at a piano. Turning that tape into a Beatles record required the others to build around a performance whose timing wasn't steady. In a 2007 interview with Yamaha's All Access magazine, Lynne recalled receiving a mono cassette with both voice and piano on it. “There was tons of hiss, and the piano was loud,” he said. His solution was to establish an average tempo for the backing track, fit Lennon's performance into it, then add McCartney and Harrison's harmonies. The tape's timing helped determine how the new recording had to be assembled.
The rest of Anthology 1 moved back through much earlier stages of the group's work. George Martin oversaw the archival project, which combined studio recordings with live performances and spoken recollections. Its 60 tracks accompanied The Beatles Anthology television documentary, but the running order also told a story through the recordings themselves. A home tape, an audition and an abandoned studio take each captured the band working under different circumstances.
The earliest material included the Quarrymen's 1958 recordings of “That'll Be the Day” and “In Spite of All the Danger.” Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were already playing together, and the latter song carried a writing credit for McCartney and Harrison. Recorded at a home studio in Liverpool, it placed their own writing beside a cover song before the Beatles name or their recording contract. The collection then followed them into the 1962 Decca audition and their early EMI sessions, letting those formative performances occupy space alongside the more familiar songs.
Some of the most revealing material showed how quickly an arrangement could change. The two takes of “I'll Be Back” came from a single June 1964 session. On take two, Lennon tried the song in waltz time, then stopped because he was struggling to sing it that way. Take three switched to four beats in a bar, moving toward the version that appeared on the UK album A Hard Day's Night. Placing the attempts together let listeners follow a specific decision: the song's rhythm changed between consecutive takes, while the finished album had presented only the result.
Harrison's “You Know What to Do” offered a different kind of discovery. He recorded the demo in June 1964, but it remained unreleased until Anthology 1. According to The Beatles Bible's session history, documentation surfaced in 1991 and the tape was found in 1993. The session contained a brief test followed by one full take. Its eventual release added an early Harrison composition to the available catalog, preserving a song that hadn't developed into a finished Beatles master.
The series continued in 1996 with Anthology 2 in March and Anthology 3 in October. The second volume opened with “Real Love,” another Lennon recording completed by McCartney, Harrison and Starr. The work begun for the retrospective had produced two new Beatles recordings alongside the recovered archive.
