Sixty years after the start of Beatlemania and with two members of the quartet already dead, artificial intelligence has allowed the release next week of what is promised to be the last “new” Beatles song.
The song, called ‘Now And Then’, will be available starting Thursday, November 2, as part of a single mixed with ‘Love Me Do’, the Beatles’ first single released in 1962 in England. The song comes from the same batch of unreleased demos written after the late John Lennon that were taken up by his former bandmates to construct the songs ‘Free As a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, released in the mid-nineties.
Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison worked on ‘Now And Then’ in the same sessions, but technological limitations got in the way. With the help of artificial intelligence, director Peter Jackson solved those problems by “separating” Lennon’s original voice from a piano used in the late 1970s. The much clearer vocals allowed McCartney and Starr to complete the song last year. .
The new single features a guitar that Harrison had recorded almost three decades ago, a new drum part from Starr, with bass, piano and a slide guitar solo from McCartney that he added as a tribute to Harrison, who died in 2001. While which McCartney and Starr sing as accompaniment. McCartney also added a string arrangement written with the help of Giles Martin, son of the late Beatles producer George Martin.
If that wasn’t enough, they incorporated backing vocals from the Beatles’ original recordings of ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Because’. “It’s quite emotional. And we all played on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023, still working on Beatles music and being about to release a new song that the public hasn’t heard, I think is pretty exciting,” McCartney said in the announcement.
Harrison’s widow, Olivia, said that in the 1990s she felt that technical problems made it impossible to release a song that met the band’s standards. With the improvements, she “would have wholeheartedly joined” Paul and Ringo in completing the song now if he were still alive, she said.
Next Wednesday, one day before the song’s release, a 12-minute film telling the story of the new release will be released. Expanded versions of the Beatles compilations ‘1962-1966’ and ‘1967-1970’ will be released within a month. ‘Now And Then’, despite being published long after 1970, will be added to this latest collection.
“This is the last song where you will have all four Beatles on the same song. John, Paul, George and Ringo,” Starr said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
