I know, I know: You’re looking at that headline and thinking, “Uh, the Beatles broke up years ago, there are only two of them that are alive, how could they release a new single?”
Here’s the answer: Back in June, Paul McCartney announced he would be using AI to help turn a demo with John Lennon into a new single with all four Beatles on it. There was a ton of speculation — would it be the much-discussed Now and Then? — and some uproar over the idea of using AI assistance.
McCartney then tweeted this to clear up confusion, which … didn’t clear up much beyond “It’s all real and we all play on it.”
Been great to see such an exciting response to our forthcoming Beatles project. No one is more excited than us to be sharing something with you later in the year.
We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it. Seems to be a lot of guess work out there. Can’t say too much…
— Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) June 22, 2023
Got all that? Good. Because this was a tweet from The Beatles on Wednesday:
https://t.co/WD7FPPbm1P pic.twitter.com/xEXToI76E2
— The Beatles (@thebeatles) October 25, 2023
Doesn’t seem like much, right? Except when you go to the Beatles’ site, you can see there’s a copyright label on a demo tape that’s hard to read, but it appears to point to a recording owned by Yoko Ono Lennon and is licensed to Apple Corps (the Beatles’ founded the media corporation in the 1960s):
NOW AND THEN BY THE BEATLES IS COMING THIS IS NOT A DRILL 🗣️ pic.twitter.com/E06Vu9C2zc
— Mariana Stanley Smith ((°⍸°)) 🍏 (@marianabrickman) October 25, 2023
So … could this be Now and Then? It was a demo from John Lennon that the other three eventually worked on to some extent during the Anthology series in the mid-1990s.
We’ll find out soon, I hope.