Hello, hello. I don’t know why you say goodbye, I thought you’d left. Now and Then, the Beatles’ final final song came out last week.
We have it thanks to a new AI solution. The last song on a tape John left for Paul was dropped in a big bucket of said solution and all its impurities – hiss , pianos – sank to the bottom leaving pure John voice floating on top, to be scooped up and mixed with some 90s George guitar parts, some newer Paul and Ringo, and strings.
The AI was MAL (Machine Audio Learning), the system Peter Jackson’s team put together for the Get Back documentary.
It was used to clean up the notoriously noisy Nagra audio tapes that the original film-makers used to record the sessions for Let It Be. MAL – named for the Beatles’ faithful road manager Mal Evans – learned how to pick out guitars, then drums, then bass, then speech, and eventually started to learn the different Beatles’ voices, eventually producing crystal-clear recordings of the band in conversation or rehearsal with all the background stripped away. MAL was recently put to work on John’s tape.
The tape had three songs on it. It was probably recorded somewhere around the time of John and Yoko’s Double Fantasy which is one side of a good album spread over two. It’s the one with Woman, (Just Like) Starting Over and Watching the Wheels. Pretty good if a little saccharine. It’s also the one with seven Yoko songs and John’s Dear Yoko. Not so good. The three songs on the tape didn’t make that cut.
Of the three, Free As A Bird and Real Love were events. (I was a passenger in a colleague’s car on the way to work when Free As A Bird first played on the radio, and his illegal police speed gun detector beeped throughout.) Those songs came out in 1995 to boost The Beatles’ Anthology, their best documentary until Get Back last year. They were decent enough songs even if it was a little hard to see what they would have squeezed out on any Beatles album. The third song, Now and Then, wouldn’t have stood a chance.
On the original tape, John’s voice and piano on Now and Then were too tightly bound together to let the other Beatles add their bits. It had to wait for MAL to prise apart what was already there. The AI has not added any synthetic flourishes that didn’t come from one or another Beatle. George’s 30-year-old guitar work is typically tidy, Ringo’s drum work is dead-on but it’s something of a vocal mismatch; a duet between one man not yet 40 and another just past 80.
The release of the new song assumes that it was John’s intent to have Paul and co finish it. But maybe the songs were just his vocabulary for articulating his feelings for Paul. Maybe the tape was a letter. The lyrics have that feel.
“Now and then / I miss you / Oh, now and then / I want you to be there for me / Always to return to me.”
Maybe a make-up message for Paul, certainly a pretty run-of-the-mill love song.
The Beatles of course never all played together after 1969. They were all alive for another decade but the band, always the sum of its parts and then some, had died. We can wonder what they might have done if they had stuck with it or drifted back together. Get Back showed us that they had irreparably come apart, Now and Then shows us that the coming together would probably have been a let-down. If this was the first Beatles song you ever heard, you’d have no idea what the fuss was all about. But it does offer a suggestion of what four people could offer each other and what their journey cost them.
AI will do some wonderful things – Val Kilmer, who lost his voice to cancer, delivered his lines in Top Gun: Maverick using AI trained on old voice recordings. It will do some awful things – a convincing fake voice might have influenced the outcome of recent elections in Slovakia. And it will do some pretty unremarkable things. This is one of those. There’s no AI in The Beatles but it’s all over a bit of a damp squib.