The Beatles’ highly anticipated song Now and Then was finally released on Thursday. Using artificial intelligence, the surviving band members dusted off an old demo recorded by John Lennon in the 1970s. The result is moving.
The melancholic ballad was originally written in 1977 by John Lennon, leader of the Fab Four. In the demo, the latter accompanies himself alone at the piano in his New York apartment.
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With the help of producer Giles Martin, Paul McCartney spent several years breathing new life into the song, which also features a guitar part recorded by George Harrison in 1995 and drums and vocals by Ringo Starr in 2022.
In a short explanatory film entitled “Now and Then – The Last Beatles Song” we learn that the masterwork on the title began in 1994 when Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon, gave three demos to Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the late George Harrison sent .
The first two songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” were released in 1995 and 1996 as part of the sprawling multimedia project “The Beatles Anthology.”
It was close to having John in the same room as us.
The third part had been omitted and John Lennon’s voice was buried under the sound of his piano. The Beatles then decided to wait as they did not have the necessary technical means to properly isolate each individual track.
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Technology by Peter Jackson
This technological breakthrough came almost 30 years later, when Peter Jackson was working on Get Back, the nearly eight-hour documentary series about the making of the album Let It Be.
“We developed technology that allows us to take any soundtrack and use machine learning to extract the different components into separate tracks,” explains the director in “Now and Then – The Last Beatles Song.”
The original recording of John Lennon was sent to Peter Jackson’s team, who managed to greatly improve the quality so that the singer’s voice was no longer overwhelmed by the piano. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr then recorded new bass parts, drums, and additional vocals and strings to complete the song.
My father would have liked it because he was never afraid to experiment with new recording techniques. “I think it’s really beautiful,” says Sean Lennon, son of John Lennon, in the Beatles short film.
With information from Rolling Stone and CBC News