Beatles fans have records and music to enjoy for the rest of their lives. The English group was one of the most influential in the 60s and 70s, going on to change the history of music forever. Today, in the middle of 2023, we live the publication of the last song of the group.
Today marks the release of the first “new” Beatles song since 1995. “Now and Then” is available on streaming services (Spotify included) and the story behind the song’s production has sparked great interest among fans of the iconic rock band.
Related: Unveiling The Beatles’ Unsung Heroes: The Neglected Duo of the Iconic Band
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr turned to cutting-edge technology and machine learning to reconstruct a finished track from an old, low-quality recording of John Lennon.
The Beatles first attempted to create something from Lennon’s “Now and Then” demo in the mid-1990s, when McCartney, George Harrison and Starr got together to work on “new” songs that would appear on the group’s Anthology albums.
They successfully completed “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” superimposing full-band arrangements on Lennon’s demos. But progress on “Now and Then” eventually stalled, largely due to technical problems that made it difficult to work with the original tape.
Without AI it would have been impossible
“On John’s demo, the piano was a little hard to hear. And in those days, of course, we didn’t have the technology to do the separation,” McCartney said in a new mini-documentary about the song, which you have below.
“Every time we wanted a little more of John’s voice, this piano would pop up and cloud the picture,” he lamented. Until now.
In the end, the trio session involving McCartney, Harrison, and Starr ended without “Now and Then” ever being finished. “I think we just kind of ran out of steam and ran out of time. And it was like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe we’ll drop this one.'”
The song “languished in a closet,” McCartney said. Harrison died in 2001, which cast further doubt on whether the song would ever see the light of day. “It took us almost a quarter of a century to wait for the right moment to tackle ‘Now and Then’ again,” McCartney said.
The turning point came earlier this decade when director Peter Jackson was working on his comprehensive documentary The Beatles: Get Back for Disney+. His team developed technology that allowed them to take virtually any piece of music (even old demos) and “break down all the different components into separate tracks based on machine learning.
Despite the consternation of some fans, everyone involved in the project seems fully satisfied with the outcome of “Now and Then”.
