Billed as the final single from The Beatles, Now and Then was always going to be a big deal. The track, which is nominated for Song of the Year at this weekend’s Brit Awards, has its roots in a 1977 demo recorded by John Lennon.
Its mix features all four original members - Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with the late Lennon and George Harrison - and comes with a long history that includes an aborted mid-’90s attempt at a finished release.
There’s another headline-grabbing element to the eventual release of Now and Then though. As has been widely, and on occasion a little misleadingly reported, the track’s creation has been made possible thanks to the use of neural network technology. Or, as how some have more flatly termed it - AI.
This latter fact seems to have led to misconceptions among some fans, as the track’s co-producer Giles Martin (son of late Beatles producer George Martin) demonstrates in an exclusive video for MusicRadar.
“I think there is this supposition that we used AI to recreate something, or to perhaps enhance John Lennon's voice,” Martin tells us. “This simply wasn't the case. All we did was clean a cassette recording he had made all those years ago.”
It’s true that some of the public reaction to Now and Then, particularly in the wake of its recent Grammy win for Best Rock Performance, has led some to raise a suspicious eyebrow. But this perception stems from the entirely false notion that the track has harnessed some form of generative AI. Which it very much hasn't.
That misconception may well stem from a 2023 interview Paul McCartney gave to Radio 4’s Today Programme, in which the Beatle announced that he had recently completed work on a song created with the help of artificial intelligence.
In reality, the innovative technology that allowed for the creation of Now and Then is the same that was used to assemble Get Back - Peter Jackson’s lengthy and hugely revelatory three-part documentary shot during the making of what would become Let It Be in 1969.
Jackson’s team made use of machine learning technology - which they dubbed MAL (in reference to both 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL, and Beatles' long-serving roadie Mal Evans) - in order to isolate instruments, sung vocals and dialogue from the original tapes.
The same technology was later used by Martin to produce the new stereo remix of Revolver. Released in 2022, this pristine-sounding version of the 1966 classic was created using stems separated from the original four-track master tapes.
In our video, Martin addresses the misconception directly by demonstrating the technology in action. First, Giles shows how it’s capable of separating the individual instrument parts of Revolver opener Taxman, and then by playing the separated stems of Lennon’s original recording of Now and Then.
Giles spotlights something vital; “the important thing here is to realise that we're not generating anything. AI is not creating John's voice. John's voice existed on that cassette, and we made the song around him.”
Reviving Now and Then
That original demo on which Now and Then was constructed has its roots in a 1977 demo recording created by John Lennon in his Dakota Building apartment in NYC.
Following Lennon’s death in 1980, two cassettes of demo recordings were given to McCartney containing the unfinished version of Now and Then along with three other work-in-progress songs, Free as a Bird, Real Love and Grow Old With Me.
In the mid-’90s the surviving Beatles worked on completing those demos with producer Jeff Lynne around the release of The Beatles Anthology.
Free as a Bird and Real Love were completed during those sessions, and released as singles to promote a trilogy of expansive compilations of studio outtakes and early demos.
Although an attempt was made to create a finished version of Now and Then - the third in this planned trilogy - the track was ultimately abandoned due, at least in part, to the difficulties of working with a poor quality demo recording.
Thanks to the machine learning technology used on Get Back, it became possible to isolate a clean audio file of Lennon’s vocals from the original demo recording.
The final version of Now and Then, which was eventually released in November last year, was produced by McCartney and Martin based around that vocal recording.
Despite incorporating parts written and recorded across a span of almost 50 years, Martin claims that any challenge involved in mixing these disparate elements was overridden by the natural cohesion between contributions of the four original members.
“There's always a challenge in mixing anything and getting everyone to settle down,” he says. “But as this was all the Beatles playing, they obviously compliment each other beautifully in what they do. There wasn’t too much of a challenge.”
Martin would be right to push back on the perception that AI has made some sort of creative contribution to the song. Although the technology has been instrumental in allowing its creation, there’s nothing that has been written or generated by anything other than real musicians.
Surviving Beatles McCartney and Ringo Starr contributed new instrument and vocal parts, while George Harrison’s guitar parts from the aborted ‘90s sessions were also incorporated into the arrangement, along with a newly recorded string arrangement.
“It was purely Paul's decision to work on this record, and he led that decision based on having heard the work that we've done with Peter Jackson,” Martin tells us.
That’s not to say Now and Then sticks religiously to Lennon’s original vision. Along with the additional instrumentation, the final version adds new lyrics and omits a pre-chorus from Lennon’s demo. These creative decisions were taken by McCartney, though.
While there’s plenty for Beatles fans to debate around Now and Then’s various iterations and its place within the band’s canon, any supposed questions around the ethics of AI are something of a misnomer.
What’s more, while the MAL technology used but Peter Jackson’s team has been trailblazing and is undeniably impressive (as anyone that’s seen Get Back can attest) mass-market technology is already catching up on those capabilities.
The separation tools used in the creation of Now and Then aren’t a million miles away from similar stem seperation tech now included in the likes of Apple’s Logic Pro and Image-Line's FL Studio.
In other words, as much as Now and Then remains noteworthy and is without question an impressive achievement, the 'AI' element is really one of the less interesting parts of its story.
Artificial influence
While Martin and McCartney didn’t employ AI as a generative or creative tool in producing Now and Then, that’s not to say that doing so is beyond the realms of what’s technologically possible.
We’re living in a time where machine learning and AI-driven tech is making a lot of new concepts possible, or at least easier to achieve, from remixing old recordings to creating full ‘deepfake’ versions of late musicians.
For Martin, however, there are definite lines that shouldn’t be crossed when it comes to tampering with the legacy of musicians like Lennon and Harrison.
“It's fundamental that if any technology is used in a recording, it should be done with the artist's approval,” he tells us. “The idea that anyone could generate an imitation or deepfake of an artist without their permission, or even create a deepfake recording of anything is, I think, very dangerous. It's really important that the artist owns their own voice, when it comes to using this technology.”
The discussion around AI’s use in the creation of Now and Then is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg in what we’ll see in the near future, as rapidly advancing AI technology makes its mark on society.
The impact of machine learning and generative tech is likely to be particularly prevalent in creative industries like music production.
“It may provide more of a threat if used in the wrong way,” Martin says. “As someone who embraces technology in the same way that my father and The Beatles did, I think that it's up to the user to make the right decisions based around how they use the technology.”
The link between The Beatles and cutting-edge recording technology is nothing new, of course.
The recording sessions the band undertook with George Martin at Abbey Road pioneered numerous techniques, from double tracking to tape manipulation and early forms of sampling. There’s a solid case to be made that this latest use of cutting-edge tools fits perfectly into their spirit of innovation.
"[Me and my father] actually worked on a John Lennon song together, called Grow Old with Me, which he did a beautiful string arrangement for,” Martin recalls. “At that time, I remember us struggling to get a better vocal out of the cassette recording we had. This is exactly the sort of technology we would have probably used if we were doing the record again.”
The Beatles Now and Then is nominated for Song of the Year at the 2025 Brit Awards.
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