For this song, an old John Lennon demo was resurrected through the new AI technologies available. Able to separate his voice from the piano track, Paul and Ringo could then build a fresh recording around John to flesh things out. They had tried years ago, but only now can it be done. As the characters ask in every horror movie about a mad scientist, the better question isn't can it be done, but rather should it?
This song is not monstrous, but it does raise a number of ethical questions. It's a perfectly pleasant, somber John song, and if it had come about any other way, I don't think I would even give it a passing mention here. It will never stand up to the 'classics', since we know that to be psychologically impossible, but it's a nice curiosity. However, this song serves as a focal point for the dilemmas we are going to be facing in music for the foreseeable future.
First; Is it right to finish and release a song without the writer's consent?
Second; Is artificially enhanced music still the artist's music?
Third; Is it all going to sound this bad?
Let's take those in order.
First, we have to ask whether this song should exist at all. John is not here to speak for himself, and it's difficult to know whether he would have wanted the others to finish and release the song. They know better than we do his wishes, and Yoko would know even better than them, but still, releasing music an artist did not finish writing is a touchy subject. This is not the song as it would have been released by The Beatles, should they have all lived long enough to finish it. This is Paul and Ringo's interpretation, and those views could be incredibly different from what John would have turned the song into. The band famously hated what Phil Spector did to "Let It Be", so it isn't out of the question that John's opinion of this recording could be just as unpleasant. There are usually reasons why songs don't get finished, and perhaps this one was supposed to be forgotten.
Second, we have to ask if artificially modified music even counts as belonging to the artist in question. I don't think that applies much here, as they were primarily using the technology to isolate the vocal track, but that vocal is not actually what was recorded by John. It is a digital replication of what it would have sounded like, had the piano not bled over the actual track. We are hearing bits of John's voice, but it's filled out with digital sound created by an algorithm. So is it actually John's voice? We will be wrestling with that question many more times, I assume, and I don't have a good answer on where we draw the line. As the technology gets better, and fully modeled recordings sound indistinguishable from those based on analog voices, I fear the percentage of human contribution is going to dwindle until it's nothing.
Third, let's face the elephant in the room; this song doesn't actually sound very good. I don't mean to say the song isn't good, because as I said at the start, it's perfectly pleasant. No, what I'm saying is this hybrid of real and artificial recordings actually sounds terrible. Despite this being released decades after the band broke up, the sound quality is worse than any of their actual records. Perhaps they felt going for high fidelity in the instruments they re-recorded wouldn't have meshed with the old John vocal track, but that's just another reason the song should have been left alone. This is the worst sounding Beatles recording I think I've ever heard officially released, and that's a shame. If this is the band's last every statement, it deserved to be treated better.
Of course, I'm one of those people who thinks sometimes we should just let things go. There's nothing wrong with art of the past staying in the past. Not every scrap of an idea needs to be promoted until the end of time, and I think this song just goes to prove that. My life isn't worse for having heard "Now And Then", but I don't think it's better either. It was a lot of sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing.
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