The last Beatles song?

From The Washington Post (gift link):

Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back. The “new” song is set to be released later this year, he said.

Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar.’”

The song seems to be John’s “Now and Then,” which Paul, George and Ringo worked on at the time of the Beatles’ Anthology. George dismissed the song (reportedly calling it “fucking rubbish”), and “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” were the only new Beatles recordings released.

Me, I think John’s piano-vocal demo is a beautifully sad song. I hope that feeling isn’t lost under too many layers of production as the demo gets turned into a record.

Related reading
All OCA Beatles posts (Pinboard)

[Lost Media Wiki: “To date, no content from the overdub sessions in 1994 and 1995 has resurfaced either officially or unofficially.” The various versions of “Now and Then” with fuller instrumentation that can be found online are the work of fans.]