It’s been over five decades since The Beatles went their separate ways, but their music still lives on—and not just figuratively! Surviving members of the iconic rock band turned to modern technology to extract John Lennon’s vocals from an unreleased demo and finally finish their last song “Now and Then”.
Lennon recorded a demo for “Now and Then” in the late 1970s, but it took five decades for this song to finally see the light of day. The surviving members of The Beatless initially considered including it in the retrospective project The Beatles Anthology back in 1995, but extracting his vocals proved to be impossible at the time.
Things turned around thanks to the new AI-backed audio restoration technology that visionary director Peter Jackson used in his documentary The Beatles: Get Back. He also directed the music video for “Now and Then”, which featured never-before-seen footage of The Beatles’ past eras.
Paul McCartney told BBC Radio1’s Clara Amfo that it felt “magical” to record this song because it was almost like they were reunited with Lennon after all these years.
“When we were in the studio, we had John’s voice in our ears so you could imagine he was just in the next room in a vocal booth or something and we were just working with him again so it was joyful. We hadn’t experienced that for a long time,” said McCartney.
