Free As A Bird Single

"Free As A Bird" was a single released on December 12 1995 as a CD maxi single. This single was used to tie in with the "Anthology 1" release and featured the John Lennon composition as the first song. The "Beatles" version is credited to all four members. The original demo was recorded by Lennon in 1977 and over dubbed by Paul, George and Ringo at Paul's studio in Sussex February and March 1994. The second song on the CD is "I Saw Her Standing There" featuring the complete take 09 with count-in from the February 11 1963 session at EMI. The commercial version is take 1 with this count-in from take 09 edited at the beginning. The third song featured is "This Boy" outtakes 12 and 13 from the October 17 1963 session at EMI. The last song on the CD is "Christmas Time (Is Here Again)" which is the instrumental part from the 1967 Christmas flexi. This is overdubbed (boo!) with greetings from 1966 for a pirate radio station and this is an example of how the future "Anthology" series would use re-mixes and created manufactured "outtakes" losing the original concept of hearing the actual tapes as they were originally recorded. This happened mainly on "Can't Buy Me Love" from the "Anthology 1" series where the guitar solo was flown from a different take as an example.

The CD front cover has the Beatles logo topa right, a drawing of Pete Shotton surrounded by birds by John Lennon from the book "In His Own Right". The title at the bottom and "CD Maxi Single" on the bottom left and the catalogue number on the lower right. "Apple 58497". The back cover has the canvas backing similar to the 3-LP/2-CD equivilant. The artist, title and barcode at the top with the tracklisting and recording information following. The Apple logo is at the bottom left and the Capitol logo is at the bottom right. Credits and copyright information is at the bottom. The CD features a full Apple with silver backing.

About a week later on December 19 1995, a vinyl single was released in the US by Capitol and Apple. The vinyl single contains "Free As A Bird" on side one and "Christmas Time (Is Here Again)" on side two. The front cover contains the same drawing as the CD with the exception of only the artist name and title with no other writing. The back cover contains information on only the two songs contained within.

The label has a full apple on the a-side and a half label on the b-side. The labels have a cream coloured background. On the left side of the labels are the artist name and the song in question. The right side have the copyright information.