“Now and then,” the long awaited “final” song by the Beatles, featuring all four members; thanks to the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, has made its world-wide debut, years after Lennon and Harrison’s death.
“Now And Then” was released on November 2, decades after the deaths of John Lennon and George Harrison. However, Lennon and Harrison will both be on the song with surviving band-mates Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, thanks to some technology “magic.”
The song began as a demo Lennon recorded in the late 1970s, according to a Thursday press release. Lennon sang and played piano on the demo, which his wife, Yoko Ono, sent to McCartney, Harrison and Starr years after Lennon was shot to death in 1980.
Two other demos she sent them were ultimately released in the mid-1990s as “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” featuring all four Beatles. McCartney, Harrison and Starr “completed a rough mix” of “Now And Then” at the time, the press release said, but the third song wasn’t released.
The idea of releasing it was revived about two decades after Harrison’s death, while McCartney and Starr were working with director Peter Jackson on the 2021 documentary series The Beatles: Get Back. After seeing how Jackson’s team used new technology to clean up old video and audio recordings for the series, they decided to test it out on Lennon’s old demo and on the guitar Harrison recorded for “Now And Then” back in 1995. When they discovered the technology would work, McCartney and Starr built on the song, adding new bass, guitar, piano, drums and backing vocals.
McCartney described hearing Lennon’s voice on the new song as “quite emotional,” while Starr said it was “the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public hasn’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing,” McCartney said in the press release.
McCartney first hinted about the existence of a “last” new Beatles song while discussing artificial intelligence (AI) during an interview with the BBC over the summer. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI,” he said. “Then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”
McCartney described AI during the interview as both “exciting” and “kind of scary,” adding that he’d heard from people who were able to make their own songs sound like Lennon was singing on them. “There’s a good side to it, and a scary side,” he said of AI. “And we’ll just have to see where that leads.”
“Now And Then” will be released on November 2 at 10 a.m. ET as a double A-side single alongside “Love Me Do,” the first-ever Beatles single released in 1962. A music video will be released on November 3, and a 12-minute documentary about the making of the song, titled Now And Then—The Last Beatles Song, is coming out on November 1.
A trailer for the short documentary has already been released. It begins with McCartney saying, “When we lost John, we knew that it was really over.” In an audio clip recorded in 1995, Harrison then explains how they came to learn about Lennon’s old demos. Starr then recalls that, years later, “Paul called me up and said he’d like to work on ‘Now And Then.’ He put the bass on, I put the drums on.”
The trailer’s poignant acknowledgment from Lennon’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, drives home the history-making nature of the song’s release: “It’s the last song that my dad and Paul and George and Ringo will get to make together.”
