The Beatles, a band not known for letting things go quietly into the night, have managed to wriggle their way back onto the charts from beyond the grave. Their alleged final song, “Now and Then,” features vocals by the late John Lennon, which were extracted, polished and presumably reanimated from a demo tape using artificial intelligence. Because if there is one thing the 21st century adores, it is digging up cultural icons and rebooting them with machine learning and a hint of nostalgia.
The idea began, as all complex technological resurrections do, with a cassette tape. Lennon recorded a demo at home in the late 1970s on a device of such mediocre fidelity that even audiophiles wince at the very mention. This ghostly tape was gifted to the surviving Beatles by Yoko Ono in the 1990s, presumably with the full awareness that it would someday be run through a neural network so powerful it could likely diagnose small engine problems as a side gig.
Producer Jeff Lynne initially tried to finish the song during the “Anthology” project in 1995, but gave up after discovering that working with a deceased vocalist and a cassette recorder is more difficult than it sounds. However, thanks to Peter Jackson’s team from the “Get Back” documentary, AI was able to isolate Lennon’s vocals and clean them up to a level that suggests John might have been hiding in a nearby studio all along, sipping tea and biding his time.
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the surviving Beatles who refuse to retire with dignity, added new instrumentals and vocals. George Harrison, who recorded guitar parts in the 90s, is present too, meaning this track spans enough time to qualify as a musical fossil dig. The final mix of “Now and Then” is not only being hailed as a touching tribute but as a technological triumph, assuming your definition of triumph includes machine-driven séance audio engineering.
“It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles song,” McCartney said, presumably while AI engineers nodded in quiet agreement from behind a curtain of code.
Fans responded in predictably divided fashion, with some praising the track as a heartfelt goodbye and others mildly unsettled at the idea of singing with a spectral voice filtered through a hard drive. This is, of course, the same fan base that once dissected backwards lyrics looking for proof of Paul’s early demise, so everyone seems to be in their comfort zone.
The release comes with a short documentary and a music video, though no word yet on whether AI John will be taking interviews or appearing on late-night talk shows via hologram. One can only hope the technology stops short of creating new albums entirely, though knowing modern entertainment executives, that is probably being pitched as we speak.
It turns out, all you need is love, a vintage cassette, and a highly sophisticated AI trained in audio separation.