The music industry is facing the artificial intelligence revolution. Generative AI models that create great fake songs — like Drake and The Weeknd — are one side of that coin, but there is another. The one that allows The Beatles to present 'Now and Then', with the original voice of John Lennon, more than 50 years after their last time together.
“Now and Then” was a song written by John Lennon in 1978 and is part of a series of songs that the artist recorded on a cassette in his New York apartment, resulting in a tape titled “For Paul.”
Paul McCartney mentioned that he used an artificial intelligence system to extract Lennon's voice and thus be able to complete the song that has all fans eagerly waiting to enjoy once again with the legendary Liverpool band.
The song could have been included previously, in 1995, as part of a "reunion song" by the Beatles, since at that time, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were reuniting Anthology, when Yoko Ono, John Lennon's widow , sent the tape to Sir Paul.
Two of the songs from that tape, 'Free as a bird' and 'Real love', were able to see the light thanks to the remastering by music producer Jeff Lynne, and became the band's first unreleased material in 25 years.
The song 'Now and then' did not suffer the same fate, because it lacked the necessary elements, and George Harrison refused to work on it because he considered Lennon's voice quality on the tape to be “garbage.”
“For him, it didn't have a very good title, it needed some work, but it had a beautiful chorus and John sang on it. But George didn't like it, and since the Beatles were a democracy, we didn't release it," Paul McCartney said in an interview with the BBC.
With the help of Peter Jackson and artificial intelligence
For years, it seemed like the song would never see the light of day, but thanks to a software system developed by filmmaker Peter Jackson and his team, used for the production of the documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” (which chronicles the production of the album 'Let it be').
The software allowed the voices to be separated and extracted from the ambient noise and from their own instruments to obtain the clearest and cleanest audio. After that, the idea of extracting Lennon's voice from a poor quality cassette arose.
Thanks to this technology it was possible to separate Lennon's voice to remix it, already including the rest of the necessary instruments and voices. “We found that John's voice came out as clear as crystal,” said Paul McCartney. “It's very moving and we all played on it, it's a real Beatles recording.”
The song features electric and acoustic guitar recordings by George Harrison dating back to 1995 (prior to his death in 2001), and was completed in 2022 with Ringo Starr's drums, Paul McCartney's piano and bass, as well as their vocals.
What do you think of Now and Then, the last song by the four Beatles?
