Now And Then: AI-restored Beatles song wins Grammy
One last Beatles song was completed with the help of AI. The Beatles have now won a Grammy with it – It is their eighth overall.
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The Beatles' song restored with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) has won a Grammy for Best Rock Performance. According to Billboard, the song "Now and Then", which was released in 2023, is the first song to win a Grammy thanks to the support of AI. It beat off competition from the likes of Green Day. US media report on this. It is the eighth Grammy in total for the band from Liverpool.
"Now and Then"
The Beatles won their first two Grammys in 1965 – one in the "Best New Artist" category and one for "Best Performance". This was followed three years later by two Grammys for "Album of the Year" and one for "Best Contemporary Album" for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. After the Beatles disbanded, more Grammys followed in 1997. In 1997 there was a Grammy in the category "Best Long Form Music Video" for "The Beatles Anthology" and two more for the song "Free As a Bird". With this year's Grammy for "Now and Then", the Beatles have received as many awards after their break-up as they did when the band still existed.
"Now and Then" was compiled from a demo that John Lennon had recorded at the end of the 1970s. In the 1990s, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison recorded their own parts with the aim of releasing the final song in the Beatles Anthology project. However, due to technical limitations at the time, which made it impossible to separate Lennon's vocals and piano from the original lo-fi demo, "Now and Then" was not released.
Not an AI-generated song
In 2021, McCartney and Ringo Starr began to finalize the song with the help of filmmaker Peter Jackson and his sound team, according to The Verge. They developed a machine learning process that allowed them to isolate and clean up the individual components of Lennon's recording, among other things.
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As there were discussions about how the song was created, McCartney clarified to The Verge in 2023: "To be clear, nothing was created artificially or synthetically. It's all real and we're all playing on it".
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