GIMME SOME TRUTH: THE ULTIMATE MIXES BRANCH

The third branch of ‘Grow Old WIth Me’ comes from the 2020 compilation album Gimme Some Truth: The Ultimate Mixes. Prior to this, all officially released versions of John Lennon's 'Grow Old With Me' were based on a single home demo of the song, the last that Lennon made. That version contained vocal overdubs as well as a rhythm box.

Gimme Some Truth, however, uses three different vocal sources. It also varies how George Martin’s score from Anthology 1998 is used.

This version starts off using Lennon’s final home demo prior to recording overdubs. As a result, his voice is not doubled through the first chorus, and there is no rhythm box. Additionally, George Martin’s score and Giles Martin’s bass do not start at the beginning of the song, as they do in the Anthology tree versions. Rather, they come in after the first chorus, as does the vocal doubling and rhythm box.

There are other differences. Sean Ono Lennon, who produced the album, said to Anthony Fantano on The Needle Drop, “On 'Grow Old With Me,' I wound up having to do a kind of a hybrid of all these three different versions...I made some decisions there arrangement-wise that hadn't been before.”

The run time for this version is 3:21 – one second longer than Anthology-based versions. This is accounted for by Lennon saying at the very beginning “Okay let’s try it.” This line is not included in any prior official versions.

Gimme Some Truth: The Ultimate Mixes had a 36 song version (GMST 2010-36) and a 19 song version (GMST 2020-19). These two versions of ‘Grow Old With Me’ are identical, with the exception of an extremely small difference in runtime.

Overall, the Gimme Some Truth version of ‘Grow Old With Me’ is a substantial improvement over all prior officially released versions. This version moves the song, in my opinion, considerably closer toward what Lennon might have envisioned. I consider it, at present, to be the definitive version of the song.

See Official Version Analysis for additional information.