AI
The Beatles’ last song recovered thanks to AI and controversy erupted while listening to it
Now and Then”, composed and performed by the late John Lennon, was released with the participation of the remaining members of the group..
In the late 1970s, John Lennon was at the Dakota Building in New York, where he lived, shortly before he was shot by Mark David Chapman. It was there that he recorded “Now and Then,” an unreleased Beatles track that was never released. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, his bandmates, tried to recover the artist’s lost songs. Decades later, the song was brought back to life thanks to artificial intelligence, reigniting the debate over the ethics of using a deceased person’s voice and artistic legacy.
The track was included on a tape given to the group in 1994 by Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s wife, which was labeled “For Paul”. They managed to recover “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” but the technology at the time could not separate the vocals and piano to mix them with other tracks, so they had to put “Now and Then” back in the box of memories.
According to the band, for years they thought the song would never be released. However, hope began to dawn when ‘Lord of the Rings’ director Peter Jackson and his team developed the same software they used to produce the documentary ‘Get Back’: “After we had separated John’s voice on the demo tape over a year ago, Giles [Martin, son of the late George Martin] had produced an early mix of Now And Then. This had been sent to me back in 2022. I loved it. Since then I must have listened to Now And Then over 50 times, purely for pleasure,” Jackson said in an interview on the Beatles’ official website.
The group defends that they did not alter John Lennon’s voice, perhaps the most controversial ethical dilemma in this particular case. Nevertheless, the group reunited in 2023 to add their musical contributions to the song: McCartney on bass and piano and Starr on drums. Harrison’s guitar stopped strumming after his death in 2001, although it too has been recovered. In addition, Giles Martin did the string arrangement, and some additional backing vocals were added.
For or against? Different points of view
The use of this technology has been a sticking point in this case. There has been a back and forth in press releases and references to artificial intelligence have been removed, although Paul McCartney himself mentioned it some time ago. Without a clear regulatory framework, the lines have yet to be drawn, although the debate was very much in evidence during the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes.
Not all opinions are negative. For example, musician Igor Paskual has stated that he thinks it is “good that it has been recovered” because we “very much need beauty” in these times. “I think we are very afraid of anything that sounds like AI and machine, because it is believed that it dehumanizes music. And it doesn’t. There is a human fear of the machine, which is really a fear of oneself, of not being at the level of the machine,” he has argued.