After the Last Song

On 2 November 2023, a dead man released a new song. John Lennon, murdered outside his Manhattan apartment building in December 1980, sang lead vocals on “Now and Then,” the final Beatles single, almost 43 years after his killing. His voice was not synthesised, not cloned, not approximated by an algorithm trained on his catalogue. It was his actual voice, recorded on a cheap cassette player at the Dakota building sometime around 1977, rescued from decades of technical oblivion by machine learning