Photo Credit: The Beatles – “Now and Then” (Official Music Video)
The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’ is up for two Grammy awards this year, the first AI-assisted song to be nominated for an award.
Though the Beatles have been broken up for 50 years, you might feel like you’d fallen into a time vortex to learn the band is up for two Grammy awards this year. The Fab Four’s “Now and Then,” refined using AI and released last year, is up for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance, pitting the band against artists like Chappell Roan and Beyoncé.
Last year, Paul McCartney used an AI assisted program to clean up the poor sound quality of some John Lennon demos from 1978 to create “the last Beatles record.” The resulting track resurrected old recordings of both Lennon and George Harrison, alongside current recordings from McCartney and Ringo Starr, to make the song a reality.
Paul took inspiration from filmmaker Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back” documentary, the 2021 series based on archival footage of recording sessions for Let It Be. McCartney and his team used the same AI-based audio editing software producer Giles Martin used to make a new stereo mix of the Beatles’ Revolver.
The AI-based software is similar to how certain video or audio chat platforms like Zoom, FaceTime, or Discord might filter out background noise from a call. Machine learning helped isolate the sound of Lennon’s late ‘70s demo tapes to clean up existing audio for use in a modern song.
The end result is a track that’s astoundingly up for two Grammys — the first AI-assisted song to achieve such a feat. But that begs the question whether novelty will be enough to secure the Beatles a win against contemporary heavyweights like Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish. Or do these modern artists stand a chance against a legendary band like the Beatles?
Since “Now and Then” actually has the fewest Spotify streams of all Record of the Year noms for 2025 with 78 million, it seems the band might be given a run for their money in terms of securing a win. But it speaks to the depth of their reach that a long-lost Beatles track can carry that weight of two Grammy nominations half a century after their breakup.
