This is what 'Now and Then' sounds like, the last Beatles song recorded thanks to artificial intelligence

In mid-June, Paul McCartney made an announcement that no one expected: the Liverpool four were returning. The artist thus announced that on Thursday, November 2, "Now and Then" would be released, the last song by The Beatles that came more than half a century after they disbanded, and that it would be released simultaneously on 740 radio stations.

The song once again features the voices of the four members, thanks to artificial intelligence, which has allowed voices like that of John Lennon, who was murdered in 1980, and George Harrison, who died in 2001, can be heard again in this song: "So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had worked on, and we just finished it up. It will be released this year," McCartney said in that moment.

The song, however, has been in McCartney's hands since 1994. That year, Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, gave the 80-year-old singer an old cassette tape of her husband's. And from the sum of that recording and the work of producer Jeff Lynne, "Now and Then" was extracted. It was not the only song that was rescued from that recording. Other songs were also rescued such as "Free as a bird" and "Real love," which were released in 1995 and 1996.

However, "Now and Then" was not so lucky and has taken more than 25 years to come out. There were several reasons for this. The first and most important was that George Harrison did not consider the song to be good, in fact he went so far as to say that it was "garbage": "It didn't have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing, but George didn't like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn't do it," he explained in statements reported by BBC.

How was The Beatles' last song, 'Now and Then,' recovered?

Audio quality was also a problem. And that's where artificial intelligence comes in. The "Now and Then" cleanup process was made possible by this tool. A task that the living members of the band, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, explained in detail in a short 12-minute documentary uploaded on The Beatles' YouTube page.

In the video, both artists assured that this song would not have seen the light of day without the work of director Peter Jackson and his technical team. He was the one who was behind the cameras when recording "Get Back," a documentary about the Liverpool Four that included real footage from the recording of the Beatles' latest album.

Both Harrison's guitar and Lennon's voice were extracted from that recording, creating a song that they recently recovered: "Paul called me and told me he wanted to work on 'Now and Then.' He put on the bass and I put on the drums," Starr explains. Additionally, guitar parts recorded by Harrison in 1995 were also included. Along with this, McCartney and Starr explain, string arrangements commissioned from musicians who never knew they were playing a piece by The Beatles were added.

One last song that is special for both of them since, McCartney assures, it is the last song in which all the members of the Liverpool four collaborated: "'Now and Then' is probably the last song by The Beatles. We all worked on it, it's genuinely a Beatles recording."