“Why don’t The Beatles get back together,” Billy Joel asked in a song just a few years before John Lennon’s murder made that impossible, but now artificial intelligence has helped create “what will be the last Beatles record,” according to Paul McCartney this week.
One-half of the beloved Lennon-McCartney team that wrote classics like “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Here, There and Everywhere” (a personal fave), and “Come Together,” McCartney told the BBC that he used AI to “extricate” John Lennon’s voice from an unfinished demo as part of his project to produce one last Beatles song.
The band broke up in 1970 as relations between Lennon and McCartney deteriorated over personal differences, drugs, and (of course) Yoko Ono. The source material for this last recording is a 1978 Lennon demo titled “Now And Then.” At the time, Lennon was in the middle of a five-year hiatus from recording, playing house-husband to Yoko and full-time father to Sean, and part-time dad to Julian, his older son with Cynthia Powell.
Nevertheless, Lennon did spend some of his time writing and recording demos.
According to the Beeb, Lennon recorded them under terrible conditions. It was just him in his New York City apartment, on his piano or guitar, playing straight into a boombox cassette recorder. The acoustics couldn’t have been good, and the recording equipment was certainly worse. Lousy quality and all, in the early ’90s, Ono gave McCartney a cassette of Lennon’s demos labeled “For Paul” that he’d made in the year or so before his murder.
ASIDE: Why did Yoko wait more than ten years to give Paul the tape? I’m guessing she was busy screeching about robots or whatever it is she does.
Although unfinished, the song “Now And Then” was solid enough that the surviving members had considered using it in the mid-’90s as a potential reunion song for their multimedia Beatles Anthology. Maybe McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr dropped it because recording a Lennon composition without a Lennon vocal just wasn’t right — but there was no way to wring a Beatles-quality Lennon vocal out of a lo-fi, hissy cassette tape.
Here’s a YouTube version of the demo, cleaned up using non-AI technology and still not ready for prime time.
According to McCartney, Harrison at the time called the quality of the recording “rubbish.” Nevertheless, the unfinished song stuck with McCartney through the years and prompted his desire to finish it. “I’m going to nick in with [producer] Jeff [Lynne] and do it,” he told BBC4 nearly a dozen years ago. “Finish it, one of these days.”
The rise of A.I. in the 2020s has made possible something no one could have done in 1995: get that Lennon vocal sparkling clean as anything George Martin ever produced with The Beatles. AI-based technology developed for Get Back documentary producer Peter Jackson — of Lord of the Rings fame and Hobbit infamy — allowed Paul to feed the “ropey” cassette recording into a computer and tell it, “That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.”
The result, with McCartney finishing the Lennon-McCartney songwriting duties and Jeff Lynne doing his best George Martin on the production side, is arguably tantamount to one last Beatles song, 53 years after the Fab Four parted ways.
Or at least as close to one as fans will ever get.
McCartney says the “new” recording is complete and will be released sometime this year.
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Lastly, in case you’re interested, here’s the Billy Joel song referenced at the top, “All You Want To Do Is Dance.” The song has a Caribbean beat that New Wave artists, following hard in Bob Marley’s footsteps, helped popularize in the mid-’70s, but the sound of the production — particularly on Joel’s vocals — is unmistakably Beatlesque.
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