Call it the Beatles’ third law: For every song that’s become an indelible part of the Western pop canon, there’s an equal and opposite “What if?” What if they’d mended the band’s fractured foundation in the ’60s? What if more of them had made it to old age? How many more songs could there have been?
We now have a tantalizing hint at an answer in the form of “Now and Then,” a new single being billed as the final Beatles song. Coproduced by Paul McCartney and Giles Martin, it features elements from all four of the lads from Liverpool—including a John Lennon vocal track that was first recorded as a demo tape in the 1970s. “Now and Then” has been in the works for decades and its existence can be credited, in some part, to the remaining Beatles, Yoko Ono, film producer and director Peter Jackson, and advanced machine learning.
Ahead of working on the 1995 The Beatles Anthology project—which included a television documentary, a three-volume set of double albums, and a book—McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were given four of Lennon’s demo cassette tapes by his widow, Ono. When the three remaining Beatles came together in the studio, they managed to rework two of those demos into proper songs: “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” They also recorded some guitar and drum parts to accompany Lennon’s “Now and Then” demo, but the song proved to be unworkable: The quality of the cassette recording was too low, and the vocal was too mired in Lennon’s piano and the sound of a TV playing in the background.
The demo sat in McCartney’s archives until recently, when Jackson’s work on 2021’s The Beatles: Get Back documentary (which uses archival footage and audio to document the process of making Let It Be) opened the doors to AI-powered audio de-mixing tech. Jackson and his team in New Zealand developed the tech for the film, using it to separate and improve voices and instruments from mono recordings made in the 1970s as part of a Let It Be documentary that was released at the same time as the album.
McCartney asked them to apply the tech to Lennon’s “Now and Then” cassette, and they were finally able to properly isolate his vocals from the background noise and piano. Empowered by the technology, McCartney pushed to turn the demo into a full-fledged Beatles song.
“Paul is not one to sit still on things,” says coproducer Martin, whose father, George Martin, was the Beatles’ longtime producer. “And obviously, he wanted to work with John again.”
Besides recording his own bass parts and harmonies, McCartney unearthed guitar parts that Harrison recorded in 1995, enlisted Starr to play drums, and had Martin write parts for strings. He also created a slide guitar solo inspired by Harrison, who featured the slide guitar prominently in his post-Beatles solo career. The result is a surprisingly seamless song for having been cobbled together by elements from different decades.