“Now and Then” is a song released just a month ago featuring musical contributions from all four Beatles. It has been marketed as the “Beatles last song” despite having broken up over fifty years ago. Much of it is made up of past recordings (being that John Lennon and George Harrison have been dead for over 40 and 20 years now respectively) pieced together and enhanced using AI to create the finished product.
This all started from a rough piano demo John Lennon recorded in the seventies of a song he had been working on. In 1994, preceding the Beatles Anthology project was to be recorded and released, Yoko Ono gifted the demo tapes to the remaining Beatles. At one point it was to be one of the new singles released for “Beatles Anthology”, but at the time the demo tapes were deemed unusable due to engineers being unable to distinguish Lennon’s voice, piano, and remove his television playing in the background. Still, George Harrison recorded extensive guitar parts to accompany the song, as well as Paul McCartney playing bass and Ringo Starr on drums.
Following Peter Jackson using machine learning to isolate voices and instrumentation for the Beatles documentary Get Back, Giles Martin approached McCartney and Starr with the idea to revisit “Now and Then” using AI to isolate the different parts on Lennon’s demo. McCartney recorded new bass and vocal tracks, Starr rerecorded drums, a string section was recorded, all to fit in line with Lennon’s piano and Harrison’s guitar part, giving the world this final result.
On one hand, I love it. A brand-new Beatles song with all four members playing in 2023 was not on my bingo card for this year. Musically I also quite like the song as well, with Lennon crafting an introspective bittersweet, yet overall joyful song, featuring Harrisons iconic bright sound through his guitar solo. On the other hand, however, it feels kind of sacrilegious to dig up old recordings that Lennon did not intend to be Beatles music, use AI to falsely attempt to recreate his musicality, and market it to the world as “The Beatles Final Song!” Listening to it is quite jarring as well, as you can hear the tracks definitely come from different eras and technologies, with parts from different centuries stacked on top of one another in an attempt to create a feeling of a real band being together in one room, when that hasn’t been the case in fifty years. I don’t know if it’s this juxtaposition of recordings or the attempted AI restoration, but Lennon’s voice sounds a tad robotic, which certainly doesn’t help AI’s case when it comes to music.
Overall it’s definitely an interesting story and nice to have if you want to listen to, but the ethics of it become a little too gray for me to enjoy it fully, as I usually don’t like to be pondering AI’s possible destruction of human creativity when I’m listening to my music.