I imagine almost all of us have heard the "final" Beatles song by now. If you haven't then go watch and listen to it. It's a nice enough tune. I put final in quotes because the way this song was made opens the door to more, so is it really the final one? Anyway, it's a little weird in that they are combining vocals and piano from John from a demo recorded in the 70s and guitar from George recorded during the brief 90s reunion with tracks from Paul and Ringo recorded now. And both Ringo and Paul recorded separately, not together. All in all, it's a bit of a strange composition.

The song itself is a bit too sentimental for me, but the Beatles have done sentimental before and each of them has done sentimental in their solo work, so it's not out of place. We know that George hated it, calling it "fucking rubbish" during the 90s reunion and refuse to work on it more, but it's not clear if it was the song he disliked or if he just thought the demo condition was too bad to work with. If the latter, he might have changed his mind when he saw what the new AI technology could do in salvaging the demo. His wife and son may have been of that opinion when they gave Paul the okay in producing it.

The chords are pure John and the lyrics fit with what he was doing in the 70s, when he was under the influence of heroin and God knows what else and was trying to pull his life together while reflecting on the past. Reportedly on the demo tape John had written "For Paul".

Paul has always been the emotional heart of the group. His emotional songs are more of the bubbly pop variety, the the sun is shining, the grass is green, everything is nice when I'm with you type of thing. The Silly Love Songs vibe. That said, his tendency towards emotion combined with John seeming to write this song for him, well, one can understand how the song may have haunted him over the years after he heard it and why he wanted to do it so badly. The Beatles have arguably been his group since Abby Road and this is of course especially true now that two of them are dead, so it's also not hard to think he forced Ringo to go along with this song and applied equal pressure to Yoko and Olivia/Dhani to give their ok. That could be why Ringo didn't fly out to record in person with Paul and instead did it at home studio alone.

At any rate, it's a good song. Not great in my opinion, but good to have. Go listen and see what you think.

What really interests me, and what prompts me to write this piece is how the song was made and what this means for the future. The condition of the demo tape was evidently not good, and this may have been why Paul and Ringo agreed to abandon it in the 90s when George refused to work more on it. There was no way to separate John's voice from his piano with the technology of the time.

Flash forward to now, Peter Jackson went to Paul and told him that we now have the technology to separate out John's voice and clean up but the voice and piano track with AI. He gave Paul a demo of this and the result is what motivated Paul to go ahead and produce the song.

What other demo tapes are laying around with half finished songs that AI could help someone finalize? Moreover, how can AI be used to improve already existing songs? The other day I saw that someone used AI to clean up John's voice on both Free As a Bird and Real Love and remix them.

The results of both of those are amazing. I'm not sure what I think about that Real Love remix, but the Free As a Bird remix is so much better than the official one. The way he recovered John's voice and put it to the forefront is just mind blowing.

Someone also used AI to help him remix Now and Then to be much quicker and shorter, calling it the 1964 version and calling to mind their early songs from that era, making it sound more like a boppy love song to a teenage girl instead of the more sentimental love song to from John to Paul.

But let's go further. As AI improves, what's to stop it from doing the voice of any of the Beatles perfectly? No longer will we have to find half-finished demo tapes to improve, but scraps of lyrics written and abandoned could be turned into full songs. Where does it end?

Anyway, enjoy following all those song links, and leave your thoughts in the comments.

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org.