Listen to the last new Beatles' song with John, Paul, George, Ringo and A.I. tech: 'Now and Then'
The Beatles, foreground from left, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr on drums perform on the "Ed Sullivan Show" in Manhattan on Feb. 9, 1964. Sixty years after the onset of Beatlemania and with two of the quartet now dead, artificial intelligence enabled Thursday's release of the final “new” Beatles song, “Now and Then.” Credit: AP
The final Beatles recording is here.
Titled “Now and Then,” the almost impossible-to-believe track is 4 minutes and 8 seconds of the first and only original Beatles recording of the 21st century. There's a countdown, then acoustic guitar strumming and piano bleed into the unmistakable vocal tone of John Lennon in the song's introduction: “I know it’s true / It’s all because of you / And if I make it through / It’s all because of you.”
More than four decades since Lennon's murder and two since George Harrison's death, the very last Beatles song has been released as a double A-side single with “Love Me Do,” the band's 1962 debut single.
“Now and Then” comes from the same batch of unreleased demos written by Lennon in the 1970s, which were given to his former bandmates by Yoko Ono. They used the tape to construct the songs “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” released in the mid-1990s. But there were technical limitations to finishing “Now and Then.”
On Wednesday, a short film titled “The Beatles — Now And Then — The Last Beatles Song” was released, detailing the creation of the track. On the original tape, Lennon's voice was hidden; the piano was “hard to hear,” as Paul McCartney describes it. “And in those days, of course, we didn't have the technology to do the separation.”
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 sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” And so, they were able to isolate Lennon's voice from the original cassette and complete “Now and Then” using machine learning.
McCartney and Starr built the track from Lennon's demo, adding guitar parts Harrison wrote in the 1995 sessions and a slide guitar solo in his signature style.
On Friday, an official music video for “Now and Then,” directed by Jackson, will premiere on The Beatles' YouTube channel. It was created using footage McCartney and Starr took of themselves performing, 14 hours of “long forgotten film shot during the 1995 recording sessions, including several hours of Paul, George and Ringo working on ‘Now and Then,’ ” Jackson said in a statement.
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