John Lennon 'would've loved’ The Beatles’ resurrection of ‘Now and Then’

The Beatles’ Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have dropped the ‘last’ Beatles song Now and Then, which is a finished version of an old lo-fi recording by John Lennon, who “would’ve loved” it, per his son Sean Ono Lennon.

The two remaining Beatles took help from AI technology to bring the icon’s song to completion. They used a technology that splits “all the different components into separate tracks based on machine learning.”

The duo had to rely on technology as they had first tried to work on the song in the ‘90s, but couldn’t succeed because of a piano sequence in the song that would play over Lennon’s singing: “In John’s demo tape, the piano was a little hard to hear. And in those days, of course, we didn’t have the technology to do the separation,” said McCartney.

“Every time we wanted a little bit more of John’s voice, this piano came through and clouded the picture,” he added.

However the song came to be completed, Lennon’s son Sean says he would have given the Beatles a thumbs up: “My dad would’ve loved that, because he was never shy to experiment with recording technology. I think it’s really beautiful,” said Sean Ono Lennon.

As for more music from The Beatles, McCartney shared, “to still be working on Beatles music in 2023... wow. We’re actually messing around with state-of-the-art technology, which is something the Beatles would’ve been very interested in. ‘Now and Then,’ it’s probably like the last Beatles song. And we’ve all played on it, so it is a genuine Beatle recording.”