The Beatles’ final song doesn’t have to be final, says Peter Jackson
"Now And Then" is billed as the final Beatles song, but Peter Jackson has the means to make a few more
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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.
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“Beatles songs all tended to be three, maybe three and a half minutes, but as we were working on, all these great ideas kept coming. So finally Giles said, ‘Well, let’s just make the song eleven minutes long.’ But there were still all these great ideas, so it was like, ‘What about three songs that are eleven minutes apiece?’ But then Giles pointed out that there are two sides two a vinyl record, so three songs don’t really fit. So that’s how we ended up with four brand-new, eleven-minute, AI-assisted Beatles songs. Even the timing worked out. It was amazing, we put those drumsticks in Ringo’s hands, he counted us in, and then he died.” – Peter Jackson, 2033
Giles Martin, continuing his father’s cottage industry of commenting on The Beatles.
To be fair, I think Paul McCartney has more say in whether this is the last Beatles song than Peter Jackson does.
But what this piece presupposes it, what if he didn’t?
Oh look at you mister high and mighty, boldly declaring that Peter Jackson is not a member of the Beatles.
So the Beatles were
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
George Harrison
Ringo Starr
Murray “The K” Kauffman
George Martin
Brian Epstein
Giles Martin
Peter Jackson
The Fab Nine?
To paraphrase George at C4B, “we almost forgot Billy Preston!”
DAMN!!!
THE NINE
at last the truth is revealed…
What, no love for Pete Best?
“He was the worst!”
I wouldn’t mind a release of the longer version of Dig It that subtracts out the buzzing noise Heather McCartney was making. This wouldn’t be a new song, technically, just a restoration of the full jam session.
But then how tempting would it be to then take “I Told You Before”, and clean it up, removing that electronic interference? It’s a slippery – and seductive – slope.
It would be more akin to what they did with You Know My Name on Anthology III. Just an extended version of a song they already released, with the foreground noise that originally marred the full song removed.
TBC, I have no objection to any of it so long as the 4 parties approve. Bring it.
“We can put their corpses on parade forever! Death is no escape anymore! Thanks AI!”
Coming in 2025! The NEW Beatles album we’ve all been waiting for!“A Case of the Blues”“Gone Tomorrow, Here Today”“I Told You Before”“Mad Man”“What’s The New Mary Jane?”“Watching Rainbows”“Sour Milk Sea”“Not Guilty”“Circles”…and many more “rescues”!!
“Now And Then” is billed as the final Beatles songIt’s not a Beatles song, though. Just like Rogue One isn’t a performance by Peter Cushing.
But with the advent of new technology, the last new song doesn’t really have to be the last, does it? Yes, it does.
Wait, did they re-create the Lenon and Harrison parts with AI? My understanding is AI was used to clean up old recordings. Not to generate new sounds. Anyway it’s an interesting thing to debate I think. Like technically couldn’t Paul and Ringo recruit new people declare “the Beatles are back!” and keep churning out Beatles songs? What are the rules? I know there were competing versions of The Beach Boys at one point.
That’s pretty much it. They didn’t generate a deepfake of Lennon’s voice, they just used AI to subtract the piano part and some static from the original tape.
Haven’t there been like 72 Temptations at this point?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
That isn’t accurate at all. They had a tape of John singing, but the tape also included a piano and a television. They used a computer to mute the piano and the TV. Noise cancellation is nothing new, it is just that it just got alot better.The better analogy would be Carrie Fisher in The Rise of Skywalker. They took footage she had already filmed and dropped it into a different scene.
Splitting hairs, but the AI just separated the vocals from the piano and cleaned up the audio hiss, etc.
It absolutely is a Beatles song. There were no generative AI used in this song at all, only ML separated stems.
Or we could just let a near-perfect career be what it is and move onto to other things? Just a suggestion.
Peter…stop.
Despite what the headline insinuates, I’m pretty sure he hasn’t even thought to start.
We went from “OK, that was a surprisingly tasteful final song assisted by AI” to “You know, I could crank out a few more of these” in record time.
He’s clearly responding to an interviewer, and his answer is “the material is there, it’s technically possible, but I haven’t even thought about it much less discussed anything with Paul.”I really don’t think that’s so bad, and he’s not wrong — the material is there, and the amount is just going to grow as our ability to extract signal from noisy data gets better and better. (I know people are grousing about it in this case, but this is actually really cool across the board in terms of how much interpretable information we’re able to wring out of experimental data.)
Peter, just go listen to Ethan Hawke’s Black Album.
Maybe now we’ll get that version of Lord of the Rings starring the Fab Four.
The Beatles’ final song doesn’t have to be final, says the asshole with the most to gain from it.
What if there’s a version of the White Album with an Elf-Dwarf love story and shiny Legolas, like Lennon originally intended?
Let it be.
Please stop! it is ghoulish. i can accept Now and Then as an experiment, but to suggest doing more? urgh.
PJ, go back to making movies. More Hobbit movies, if you have to. No good will come from the road you’re on now.
It’s almost like he’s gotten hold of something that gives him a great sense of power, but it’s slowly corrupting him and twisting his good intentions.
You can have an AI copy a voice all you want. It’s till a soulless copy, no matter how close it sounds.