British band The Beatles, which broke up in 1970, released their last song this Thursday afternoon. Artificial intelligence helped deliver the voice of John Lennon, murdered ten years after the band broke up. The composition was completed by the two remaining surviving members, 81-year-old bassist and guitarist Paul McCartney with 83-year-old drummer Ringo Starr.
The last Beatles song is called Now and Then. | Video: Universal Music
Song titled Now and Then released by Universal Music as a digital single and on vinyl, the second side of which contains Love Me Do – symbolically the first ever Beatles hit from 1962.
The circumstances under which the “novelty” was created are described in a twelve-minute film directed by Oliver Murray that YouTube. In addition to Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, Lennon’s son Sean Ono Lennon and director Peter Jackson, who released the documentary miniseries The Beatles: Get Back, speak in it.
It was while working on it that Jackson’s team managed to separate and isolate Lennon’s voice from the instruments and movements. Thanks to this, it was possible to complete Now and Then on the basis of 53 years after the breakup of the famous foursome demo imagewhich Lennon composed at home at the piano in the late 1970s.
Yoko Ono’s widow later passed it on to the remaining band members. They did finish the song, but not in sufficient quality to be able to release it. McCartney and Starr were enabled by the most modern technology. The electric and acoustic guitars on the recording date from 1995. It also features former Beatles member George Harrison, who died in November 2001.
“Thanks to this process, we managed to develop technology that can take any soundtrack and artificial intelligence will then sort the sound into individual tracks,” said Peter Jackson.
The story of the song Now and Then begins in the late 1970s, when Lennon recorded a demo with vocals and piano in New York’s Dakota Building. In 1994, Yoko Ono gave the recording to McCartney, Starr and George Harrison – along with Lennon’s demo tapes of the song Free as a Bird a Real Lovewhich were later completed and published as part of the Anthology project.
Although the remaining three members of the lineup completed the rough mix of Now and Then with producer and musician Jeff Lynne, due to the technical limitations of the time, it was not possible to separate Lennon’s voice from the piano. The song thus remained in the archive.
New Zealand director Peter Jackson entered the game a few years ago. While filming The Beatles: Get Back with his team with the help of the so-called MAL audiotechnologie he was able to isolate individual instruments and voices, which led, among other things, to a newly remixed release of the Revolver album released in 2022. The question then arose as to what to do with the Now and Then demo. Indeed, the technicians managed to satisfactorily clean up Lennon’s track.
“Suddenly John’s voice was crystal clear,” McCartney said. “It’s quite emotional. And we’re all playing there, it’s a real Beatles record,” assures the bassist.
In addition to Lennon, it is McCartney who sings here, who also took up the bass guitar. The drums were newly recorded by Ringo Starr, the guitars came from older Harrison recordings, but one guitar solo was improvised by McCartney himself. In the studio of the recording company Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, they were then looped. Producer Giles Martin and McCartney further used the original vocals from the hits Here, There and Everywhere, Eleanor Rigby a Because.
