Countless artists are voicing their concerns over the use of artificial intelligence within creative fields, and these concerns about the controversial new tech stretch from underground artists to even making bona fide icons like the Beatles nervous. After all, one could argue that the bigger your musical profile, the more likely it is that your sound will be manipulated by AI.
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The Beatles, of course, are no exception to this rule. In addition to armchair AI techs creating “new music” that’s digitally manipulated to sound like the Fab Four, the two surviving members of the Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, have used this technology to release their 2023 track, “Now and Then.”
In a 2024 interview with Music Week, Starr said he was hopeful the AI-produced track could garner the Beatles a Grammy Award. But that doesn’t mean he’s totally comfortable with AI yet.
This New Tech Has Made Surviving Beatles Nervous
The Beatles released “Now and Then” in November 2023, just over two decades after the death of guitarist George Harrison and 43 years after the assassination of fellow Beatle and “Now and Then” composer John Lennon. The track featured the entirety of the Fab Four with the help of artificial intelligence, which engineers used to pull Lennon’s original vocals from his 1977 demo and Harrison’s guitar parts from a previously scrapped recording session in January 1994.
“Now and Then” became the Beatles’ first No. 1 hit in the U.K. in over five decades, which set a record for the longest gap between No. 1 singles of any musical act. The AI-generated track peaked at No. 7 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. The song also received two Grammy Award nominations for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards. In his December 2024 Music Week interview, Starr was hopeful that the track could garner the band their first Grammy since the 1990s.
Still, the Beatle can’t help but be nervous about the new tech that helped create their Grammy-nominated track in the first place. “We’re all a bit afraid of it because it can steal you,” Starr said. “Anyone who knows how to use it can steal you. If they just play any five of my songs into the computer, AI gets all of it and knows my every vocal move. They can have me sing anything, and it will sound like me because it’s taken from my personality.”
The Track’s Evolution Is A Testament To Changing Technology
The evolution of the 2023 track “Now and Then” is just as much a testament to how much tech has changed in just a few decades as the final product itself. In 1994, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison tried to flesh out John Lennon’s 1977 demo of “Now and Then.” But the technology of the early 1990s was a far cry from what we have today in the 2020s, and the technical difficulties proved to be too much for Harrison to overcome. So, they scrapped the idea.
“We tried [recreating the song] in the ‘90s when we got “Free As A Bird” out,” Ringo Starr said. “But we didn’t take much interest because it didn’t sound like John, and George got a bit fed up. He didn’t want to do a third one, and so we just put it to bed. But now they’ve got better equipment. They lifted John’s voice off a cassette, for God’s sake—off a cassette! It was like John was suddenly in town.”
McCartney was the Beatle who ultimately revived the cause, contacting Starr to see if he would play drums on the track. The Beatles might have left the process feeling a little nervous about the new tech, but the track’s overwhelmingly positive critical reception likely soothed the rawest of their nerves.
Photo by Daily Herald Archive/National Science & Media Museum/SSPL via Getty Images
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