The Beatles Release Their Last Song Using AI

Dubbed “the last Beatles song,” Now and Then was released on November 2nd to widespread acclaim, replacing Taylor Swift’s Is It Over Now? for the top spot on Spotify’s streaming charts in the U.K. The track features various recordings and samples from the last 4 decades, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a cohesive Beatles song that very much feels like time travel. 

Now and Then was originally recorded as a demo by John Lennon in 1977 at a time when his musical career had reached a hiatus. The demo was shelved years later following his murder in 1980, unitl his widow, Yoko Ono, discovered the tape in the mid 1990s and sent it to Lennon’s former bandmate Paul McCartney. 

The tape, which was comprised of a few other demo tracks, led to a brief Beatles reunion with the surviving members joining each other in the studio for a few recording sessions that accompanied their Anthology collection. While Lennon’s other two tracks Free as a Bird and Real Love were easy to feature on the new collection, Now and Then posed greater challenges because it was impossible to highlight Lennon’s voice without the piano getting too loud so the band ultimately abandoned the track. To make matters worse, George Harrison died in 2001, putting an end to any potential reunions. 

However, over the next two decades, computer technology continued to advance. In 2021, Peter Jackson released the Get Back documentary which condensed over 50 hours of archive footage into a 9-hour television series. To improve the quality of the film, Jackson and his team developed a new AI program called MAL (Machine Assisted Learning) to restore audio from the archive footage and remove background noises that cluttered important conversations while also optimizing the sound during musical moments. 

Following the success of Get Back, Jackson, along with McCartney and Ringo Starr, returned to the studio for another attempt at recording Now and Then. This time, assisted with AI, the band was able to finally separate Lennon’s voice from the piano, allowing it to be mixed into the track properly. The band then included recording samples from their brief reunion in the 1990s, adding George Harrison’s guitar playing while McCartney and Starr re-recorded the piano and drum parts. 

In its totality, Now and Then features recorded sections from all 4 members of the Beatles across several decades and acts as a final endpiece to their storied history. While the song’s structure is limited to the original demo tape in 1977, it continues to show how the Beatles were (and still are) pioneers of technical innovation in music, now adding artificial intelligence and machine learning to their long list of production tools.