"Now and Then," by "The Beatles"

Some time in the early 1990s, Yoko Ono provided Paul McCartney with a cassette tape that John Lennon had recorded in their NY apartment in the late 1970s. In 1995 the three surviving Beatles went to work with the tape and produced two new songs, "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love," adding backing vocals and instrumentation to the recording of John's voice. These were released as by "The Beatles" as part of  the Anthology project.

But the third song on the tape, "Now and Then," was a mess; the vocal was mixed up with a badly recorded piano and in 1995 it was judged not usable. But technology kept getting better, and Peter Jackson's team of audio engineers eventually figured out how to extract a remarkably clear track of John's voice. So Paul called Ringo and they got together and worked on the song, adding vocals and their own instrumentation, and then a guitar solo "in the style of" George, and then strings.

You can hear the resulting song here; there is also a video about the project that is interesting but is mainly a 12-minute justification.

Does the project need justification? Is this kind of amazing? Or is it instead a creepy pointer toward a future in which living musicians have to complete with the remastered, AI-processed, digitally recreated recordings of dead stars?

I can see the danger, but I can't get particularly upset about this project. It's so obviously a nostalgia trip, two old men and their aging fans trying to recreate their glory days; I can't imagine it will make much of a splash musically. It's a pretty ho-hum song, and the recovered vocal doesn't sound particularly good. And John really did record this, so his actual voice is there behind the final product in some form.

Deepfaking is a worrying thing for the future, but this project is very much about the past.