The Beatles took home a Grammy on Sunday night for their song Now and Then, nearly 55 years after the band’s breakup. The track was released back in November 2023 and now, in February 2025, it has unsurprisingly won the Best Rock Performance award, which is the first time an AI-assisted song has earned a Grammy. At least, knowingly AI-assisted. The song triumphed over competition from Pearl Jam, St. Vincent, The Black Keys, Idles, and Green Day, and was also nominated for Record of the Year but lost to Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us.
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How Was Now and Then Made?
Now and Then began as a demo recorded by John Lennon in the late 1970s. In 1994, Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, passed the recording to Paul McCartney, who, alongside Ringo Starr and the late George Harrison, attempted to complete it as part of The Beatles Anthology project. However, technical limitations at the time prevented Lennon’s vocals and piano from being properly separated from the lo-fi cassette recording, which halted progress.
It wasn’t until 2021 that advancements in audio technology made the project viable. Filmmaker Peter Jackson’s team, responsible for the Get Back documentary, developed a machine-learning system called MAL capable of isolating and enhancing individual audio components. This allowed McCartney and Starr to finally finish Now and Then with Harrison’s pre-recorded guitar parts from the 1990s sessions.
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Lennon never got to finish the track before he passed away. The string arrangement heard in the final version was put together by Paul McCartney, Giles Martin, and Ben Foster, with all four Beatles credited as songwriters.
Jeff Lynne, who produced the track and had previously worked with The Beatles on their 1995 attempt to record Now and Then, once described that session: “It was one day – one afternoon, really – messing with it. The song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn’t finish.” At the time, they struggled to make the verses work, but advancements in technology finally made it possible to clarify Lennon’s vocals.
In May 2022, session musicians gathered at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles to record the string arrangement for Now and Then. Unaware of the song’s true origins, they assumed they were working on a solo Paul McCartney track rather than a Beatles recording.
You may be wondering who played guitar if George Harrison died in 2001. Indeed, even though Harrison passed away long before the new AI-restored version of the song was released, his guitar work from the band's earlier abandoned sessions remains on Now and Then. His playing—both electric and acoustic—features on the track. In the documentary Now And Then—The Last Beatles Song, Paul McCartney shared that he recorded the slide guitar part himself, intentionally mimicking Harrison’s signature style as “a tribute to George.”
AI Assistance, Not Generation
The use of AI in Now and Then sparked debate, with some mistakenly assuming Lennon’s vocals were artificially generated. McCartney addressed these concerns ahead of the release: “To be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings — a process which has gone on for years.”
Unlike generative AI like Suno, which can synthesise new music in an artist’s style, the technology used in Now and Then simply extracted and cleaned up Lennon’s existing performance, so the tech acted as a restoration tool rather than a replacement for human artistry.
In a documentary about the song, Jackson said: “During the course of Get Back, we were paying a lot of attention to the technical restoration, which ultimately led us to develop a technology that allows us to take any soundtrack and split all the different components into separate tracks.”
Grammy Recognition and the AI Debate
This Grammy award comes at a time when the music industry is unsure if it should fight or embrace AI, with tools like Suno and Udio that parasitise on human creativity and solutions similar to the one used for Now and Then, such as Moises, LALAL.AI, or AudioShake. AI-powered stem separation played a crucial role in making Now and Then possible. The original demo recorded in the last century had significant audio quality issues: his vocals and piano were blended together, which made it difficult to isolate his voice cleanly.
Thanks to modern AI stem separation technology which now can be accessed with a click of a button online, Lennon's vocals were extracted from the noisy, low-fidelity cassette recording. This allowed for a much clearer vocal track and finally enabled Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and producer Jeff Lynne to build a new arrangement around it. Without AI-driven audio separation, Lennon's vocal would have remained buried in the original tape’s limitations, and Now and Then likely would have remained unfinished.
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. has previously said that AI-created works can be submitted for Grammy consideration, but awards will only be given to human contributors. “We’re not going to be giving a nomination or an award to an AI computer or someone who just prompted AI. That’s the distinction that we’re trying to make. It’s the human award highlighting excellence, driven by human creativity. Even though it was written by a human creator, the vocals were not legally obtained. The vocals were not cleared by the label or the artists and the song is not commercially available and because of that, it’s not eligible.”
He explained further: "At this point, we are going to allow AI music and content to be submitted, but the Grammys will only be allowed to go to human creators who have contributed creatively in the appropriate categories. If there's an AI voice singing the song or AI instrumentation, we'll consider it. But in a songwriting-based category, it has to have been written mostly by a human. Same goes for performance categories — only a human performer can be considered for a Grammy."
Besides, such usage of AI fits the guidelines of the Recording Academy which state that a work featuring "elements of AI material" can be considered in certain categories, meanwhile "a work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any categories".
