Hear the Beatles’ Final Collaboration with John, Paul, George, Ringo and AI Technology: ‘Now and Then’

The last recording by The Beatles has arrived.

The almost impossible-to-believable song called “Now and Then” is four minutes and eight seconds long from the first and only original Beatles recording of the 21st century. There’s a countdown, then an acoustic guitar strum and piano bleed into John Lennon’s unmistakable singing voice in the song’s introduction: “I know it’s true / It’s all because of you / And if I make it / It’s all because of you.”

More than four decades after Lennon’s murder and two after George Harrison’s death, the last Beatles song has been released as a double single with “Love Me Do,” the band’s 1962 debut single.

“Now and Then” comes from the same batch of unreleased demos Lennon wrote in the 1970s that Yoko Ono gave to her former bandmates. They used the tape to build the mid-1990s tracks “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love”. But there were technical limitations to finishing “Now and Then.”

On Wednesday, a short film called “The Beatles — Now And Then — The Last Beatles Song” was released, which tells the story of the creation of the song. On the original tape, Lennon’s voice was hidden; the piano was “hard to hear,” as Paul McCartney describes it. “And at the time, of course, we didn’t have the technology to separate.”

That changed in 2022, when the band — now a duo — was able to utilize the same technical restoration methods that separated the Beatles’ voices from background noise during director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” And so they were able to isolate Lennon’s voice from the original tape and finalize “Now and Then” using machine learning.

When the song was first announced in June, McCartney described AI technology as “kind of scary, but exciting,” adding, “We’ll just have to see where it goes.”

“Still working on Beatles music in 2023 — wow,” he said in “The Beatles — Now And Then — The Last Beatles Song.” “We’re actually messing around with cutting-edge technology, which is something the Beatles would have been very interested in.”

“The rumor was that we just made it up,” Ringo Starr told The Associated Press of Lennon’s contribution to the upcoming song in September. “As if we were going to do it anyway.”

“This is the last song ever to get four Beatles on a song. John, Paul, George and Ringo,” he continued.

McCartney and Starr built the song from Lennon’s demo, adding guitar parts written by George Harrison during the 1995 sessions and a slide guitar solo in their own style. McCartney and Starr followed their bass and drum parts. The string arrangement was written with the help of Giles Martin, son of the late Beatles producer George Martin – a clever nod to the classic ambition of “Strawberry Fields” or “Yesterday” or “I Am the Walrus.” Those musicians couldn’t be told that they were contributing to the last Beatles song ever, so McCartney played it as a solo effort.

On Friday, the official music video for the Jackson-directed song “Now and Then” will premiere on the Beatles’ YouTube channel. It was created using footage McCartney and Starr took of themselves performing, 14 hours of “long-forgotten footage shot during the 1995 recording sessions, including several hours of Paul, George and Ringo working now and then,” Jackson said in a statement. .

It also uses never-before-seen home film footage supplied by Lennon’s son Sean and George’s wife Olivia Harrison, as well as “a precious few seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known never-before-seen footage of The Beatles”. Pete Best, the band’s original drummer.

“The result is quite nutty and gave the video a much-needed balance between sad and funny,” Jackson said.