No, you’re not dreaming: this is the comeback everyone’s talking about. The Beatles are back on the music scene with “Now and Then” unveiled this Thursday, November 2, 2023. More than 50 years after their last album, the legendary Liverpool group shares this final title to the delight of fans.
To arrive at the release of the song “Now and Then”, let’s go back to the end of the 1970s. At that time when Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon were separated, the latter was working on a demo recorded in his apartment in New York where he lived. After the death of the Imagine singer in 1980, his widow Yoko Ono passed on the piano-voice demo tape to her ex-acolytes.
In the mid-1990s, the remaining members of the “Fab Four” attempted to continue his work. “John Lennon’s mythologized demo was first worked on in February 1995 by Paul, George and Ringo as part of The Beatles Anthology project, but it remained unfinished, in part due to the impossible technological challenges involved in the work with the voice that John had recorded on tape in the 1970s”, we are told in the summary published on the group’s YouTube channel.
While George Harrison left us in 2001, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have today given new life to the song with the artificial intelligence system. Thanks to software developed by Peter Jackson, also used for his documentary The Beatles: Get Back in 2021, it was possible to isolate John Lennon’s voice and add recordings of the last members and musical parts.
“When we made what will be the last Beatles record… We were able to get John’s voice using AI,” Sir Paul McCartney explained to the BBC last June. Five months after his statements, the title “Now and Then” rose to first place in the top 40 sales charts in the United Kingdom.
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What does the end result look like? Are you won over by the voices of the quartet who collaborated throughout their career with George Martin? Here are the images of their latest hit, accumulating more than 21 million views on YouTube, in our slideshow.