The Beatles have announced the release of their 'final' song, Now and Then, featuring all four members, on 2 November 2023. The track was completed using AI technology that isolated John Lennon's vocals from a demo tape he left to Paul McCartney.
Lennon wrote and sang the song in the late 1970s at his New York home. In 1994, Yoko Ono gave the demo to McCartney on a cassette labelled 'For Paul'. While two other songs from that tape, Free As a Bird and Real Love, were completed and released in the 1990s, Now and Then was shelved due to technological limitations in separating Lennon's vocals and piano.
The breakthrough came from AI software developed for Peter Jackson's documentary Get Back, which de-mixed audio to isolate instruments and vocals. The same technique was used to clean up Lennon's vocal performance from the piano on the demo. McCartney and Ringo Starr recorded new parts, with George Harrison's guitar parts from 1995 also included. A string arrangement was written by McCartney, Giles Martin, and Ben Foster, and backing vocals from earlier Beatles songs were woven in.
McCartney clarified that 'nothing has been artificially or synthetically created' and that the process simply cleaned up existing recordings. Starr said it was 'the closest we'll ever come to having him back in the room'. The song will be released as a double A-side single with Love Me Do, featuring cover art by Ed Ruscha.
