The Beatles have released one final song, more than 50 years since they all last made music together, with the help of artificial intelligence.
Featuring the vocals of John Lennon, guitar played by George Harrison, and finished with aid from Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the song is titled Now and Then.
The song is being released as a double A-side single with the band’s 1962 debut Love Me Do.
WATCH NOW: How The Beatles documentary used AI. Article continues after video.
Paul McCartney revealed that the world-famous British band had been back in the studio recording new music earlier this year in an interview with BBC Radio 4 Today.
The 81-year-old shared that thanks to new technology, they had been able to “extricate” John Lennon’s voice from a 45-year-old demo tape to create one final song from the “Fab Four.”
“When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo John had that we worked on and we just finished it up,” he said at the time.
“We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through AI, so then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”
When the news was first announced, The Beatles took the time to debunk the speculation that AI had created the song from scratch, stating “To be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings.”
Although McCartney did not divulge the title of the song at the time, fans correctly predicted that the final track would be a reworking of John Lennon’s 1978 demo Now and Then.
The recording was part of a cassette that Lennon labelled ‘For Paul’, with the collection of demos being produced shortly before Lennon’s tragic death in December 1980.
Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, shared the recordings with McCartney, who reunited with fellow Beatles Ringo Starr and George Harrison in 1995 to re-record and release two of Lennon’s demos, Real Love and Free As A Bird, as part of The Beatles Anthology project.
Now and Then had also been slated for release as part of Anthology however, due to Harrison’s dislike of the song, the session was scrapped.
“It didn’t have a very good title. It just needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing on it. George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it,” McCartney previously told Q Magazine.
Despite the ground-breaking technology, McCartney’s recording is not the first time The Beatles have utilised AI.
As part of the production for the 2021 documentary series Get Back, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson developed a program that would allow his team to deconstruct and enhance 140 hours of audio of The Beatles captured during their Let It Be recording sessions.
“We developed a machine learning system that we’ve taught what a guitar sounds like, what a bass sounds like, what a voice sounds like. In fact, we taught the computer what John sounds like and what Paul sounds like,” Jackson told Disney+.
This technology allowed McCartney to use Lennon’s isolated vocals from The Beatles’ 1969 rooftop performance as part of his 2022 Glastonbury Festival show, allowing the 80-year-old to perform a live duet with Lennon over 40 years after his death.
This article originally appeared on our sister site Now to Love.
