The Beatles’ “Now And Then” is on track to become the group’s 18th number-one song on the U.K. charts, more than 50 years after John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison went their separate ways. It’s likely to be their final number one, too, as McCartney has stated this is the final-ever (new) Beatles song that will be released. But with the advent of new technology, the last new song doesn’t really have to be the last, does it?
No one wants to hear artificial intelligence re-create The Beatles’ voices to sing things they’ve never sung. But Peter Jackson pioneered a new technology for the Beatles doc Get Back that used machine learning to separate out voices and sounds, which was then applied to the Lennon demo and turned into “Now And Then.” If he wanted to, Jackson could also theoretically create a “new” Beatles song from the raw material to which he has access. “It did cross my mind!” the filmmaker admits of the idea in an interview with The Sunday Times. “We can take a performance from Get Back, separate John and George, and then have Paul and Ringo add a chorus or harmonies. You might end up with a decent song but I haven’t had conversations with Paul about that. It’s fanboy stuff, but certainly conceivable.”
Conceivable, sure, but likely? Probably not in McCartney and Starr’s lifetime. (And hopefully not after, either, if that’s against their wishes, but there will need to be A.I. protections in place to prevent that from happening.) As much as “Now And Then” may come across as a way to cash in on lingering Beatlemania, it’s also clearly a passion project for McCartney. As the story goes, “Think about me every now and then, old friend” were supposedly Lennon’s last words to his former writing partner, so it’s no wonder that McCartney was determined to pull the track back out as soon as the technology to complete it became available.
“I know Paul misses John,” says Giles Martin, producer of “Now And Then” and son of original Beatles producer George Martin. “He was his best mate. There was a falling-out and he died. It was so destructive for Paul. But here he had John’s song and thought he’d like to work with him again. I don’t think that’s cynical.”
Jackson also feels “Now And Then” is a message from Lennon to his old friends: “It sounds like John is writing a message as an apology for however he may have behaved. I found that incredibly moving, that the final Beatles song is the Beatles singing to each other.” So maybe this final song will be final, after all.