LOS ANGELES — The record of the year category for the 2025 Grammys is full of zesty pop hits from young female acts such as Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter. There’s also Kendrick Lamar’s operatically vicious “Not Like Us” and some poignant, expansive work from Beyoncé and Billie Eilish.
Then there’s the Beatles’ “Now and Then.” The quartet is back on the Grammy leaderboard a full six decades after winning their first statuette. “Now and Then,” salvaged from a famously muddy demo from John Lennon, was made possible with the AI-driven, instrument-isolating mix technology first showcased in the documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back.”
Not even the deaths of Lennon and George Harrison could stand in the way of the most tantalizing prospect in rock — a new and final Beatles single, featuring all four members together.
The Recording Academy lauded the single with record and rock performance nominations. The music industry saw the achievements of “Now and Then” as a major feat of production technology and songcraft. But the academy has also set hard rules around where AI can aid in making music and where it’s disqualifying.
“Now and Then” is perhaps the best-case scenario for AI’s place in music. It’s a lost pearl of music history, made possible through subtle technology that illuminates, rather than generates. But will its Grammy success open the floodgates for more veteran artists to do the impossible — access and alter old recordings so that the past is never truly put to rest?
“I think AI is a bit like nuclear power. It can split the atom — is that a good idea? Yes if you’re creating energy, but no if it’s a bomb,” said Giles Martin, producer of “Now and Then” and son of the Beatles’ longtime producer George Martin. “For me, when I listen to to John’s voice, without fabrication, I felt like I was with him. That’s almost the opposite of AI.”
In 2023, the Recording Academy laid out ground rules for how music can incorporate artificial intelligence and still be eligible for awards. The rules say that “only human creators” can win Grammys, and “The human authorship component of the work submitted must be meaningful.”
“A work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any category,” the academy said.
“Now and Then,” released in November 2023, was never at risk there. The song, a home demo Lennon recorded in 1978, was well known to Beatles die-hards. The surviving members even took a crack at properly recording and mixing it in 1995, to little avail. For decades, the song was a holy grail for Fab Four devotees, the last song the whole band could conceivably all participate in.
It took the advanced vocal-isolation technology developed for Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back,” coupled with McCartney and Ringo Starr’s enthusiasm for the song and Martin’s deeply intimate mix work (with a team of engineers), for the prize to come into reach.
“[Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropy little bit of cassette,” McCartney told the BBC at the time. “We had John’s voice and a piano, and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’
“It’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future,” he said. “We’ll just have to see where that leads.”
But the premise of incorporating an extremely controversial — even frightening — sphere of technology into a catalog as globally cherished as the Beatles’ initially left some fans unnerved. Martin and the musicians were quick to underline that the “AI” was more or less a superpowered version of common mixing tools, not the voice-emulating or song-generating software often associated with the worst of AI in music.
“It’s a bit like Pompeii. Researchers found an amazing villa with a spa using new techniques to make an amazing discovery,” Martin said. “That’s the way I see what we’ve done. That building existed, so did John’s song. We used technology to clean it.”
The single — a beguilingly modest ballad with the band’s hallmark vocal harmonies and some wistful strings — put most fears to rest. It continued the Beatles’ lifelong interest in cutting-edge studio technology, from multitrack recording and tape-loop experiments. “When Paul played it to me at Abbey Road, I thought ‘I’m a usurper here; my dad should be around,’” Martin said. “There’s an emotional responsibility to it all, so you just try to do the best you can.”
