Ringo Starr dismisses “terrible rumours” that John Lennon didn’t sing ‘Now and Then’
November 2nd, 2023, saw The Beatles release what has been dubbed as their final single, ‘Now and Then’. The track utilised AI technology developed by Peter Jackson while he was working on the Get Back documentary, to incorporate contributions from the late George Harrison and John Lennon into the finished song.
Since then, many have questioned whether it is really Lennon’s vocals that we hear on the track. Ringo Starr has ardently dismissed this, telling AARP: “There were terrible rumours that it’s not John, it’s AI, whatever bulls- - t people said. Paul and I would not have done that. It’s a beautiful song and a nice way to finally close that door.”
Recalling how the song, which scored the band their 21st number one, came to fruition, the drummer explained: “Last year, Paul called and said, ‘You remember that unfinished song of John’s, ‘Now and Then’? Why don’t we work on that?‘ He sent it to me, and I played the drums and sang. We had a great track of John [Lennon] singing and playing piano and George [Harrison] playing rhythm guitar.”
His claim that it is purely Lennon that you hear was also ratified when we spoke to the expert Michele Darling, the chair of Electronic Production & Design at Berklee College of Music, who explained: ”It’s all John.”
Adding: ”It’s his voice from the original recording. It’s just been taken from the bad recording with the use of AI machine learning and then enhanced and sweetened with noise reduction tools and other processing that are typical in music production these days.”
Darling says that ”Peter Jackson’s team built an AI machine learning based technology that could analyse the frequencies of each of the instruments in the old demo recording that John Lennon made. In this case, it could make out the difference between John’s voice and the piano.”
While the remaining Beatles have confirmed that this will be the final song by the band, the technology opens up the possibility for any number of demo tracks to be enhanced into studio efforts, prompting a wider discussion of what the song might herald.
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