Beatles AI: Paul Macca McCartney announced to the BBC that he has used machine learning technologies to rework ‘Now and Then’, a song left behind by John Lennon. The aim? To use machine learning to create what he calls ‘the last Beatles record’. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today program, he explained that machine learning technology was used to ‘extract’ John Lennon’s voice from an old demo so that the song could be completed. “We’ve just finished it, and it’s coming out this year,” he said. Macca did not name the song, but all indications are that it is a 1978 Lennon composition entitled ‘Now and Then’.

The Demo left by Lennon

It had already been considered a possible Beatles reunion song in 1995, when Paul, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were working on the Anthology series, which later led to the release of the singles’ Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’. McCartney had received the demo a year earlier from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono. It was one of several songs on a cassette tape labelled ‘For Paul’ that Lennon had made shortly before his tragic death in 1980.

The tracks, recorded on the piano using a portable tape recorder while the musician was sitting at the piano in his flat in the Dakota Building, were remastered by Jeff Lynne, the genius of the Electric Light Orchestra and George’s personal friend and last producer. The band also tried to record the love song “Now and Then”, but the session was quickly abandoned. “The song had a chorus but was almost completely lacking in verse,” explained Lynne. “We did the backing track, a rough job that we didn’t finish.”

Magic of Technology – Beatles AI

Macca further stated that Harrison had called the song ‘rubbish’ and refused to work on it. “It didn’t have a good title, it needed reworking, but it had a beautiful verse sung by John. George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it”. In addition, the original recording had a persistent hum. In 2009, a new demo version, without the background noise, was released on a bootleg CD. McCartney has repeatedly spoken of his desire to finish the song.

Technology seems to have given the musician a chance to achieve this goal. The breakthrough would come with Peter Jackson’s documentary ‘Get Back’, where dialogue editor Emile de la Rey ‘trained’ computers to recognize the Beatles’ voices, separate them from background noise, and even their instruments to create clean audio. The same process allowed McCartney to duet with Lennon on his recent tour ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’. And now it might give us a new Beatles unreleased. A question arises: would Lennon – author of Now and Then – have liked such an operation? It is indeed true: artificial intelligence brings with it decisive questions for mankind.

Not least because the musician admitted that some applications of AI gave him cause for concern. “I’m not on the internet that much [but] people will say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s a track where John’s singing one of my songs’, and it’s just AI, you know? “It’s kind of scary but exciting because it’s the future. We’ll have to see where that leads.”