The BeatlesPaul McCartney has clarified recent comments surrounding the “final” Beatles record, which he said utilised AI technology to “extricate” John Lennon’s vocals from an old demo to complete a long-lost song.
While McCartney didn’t name the final Beatles song, the BBC reports that the song could be Now And Then, a song Lennon recorded in 1978 and was touted as a Beatles “reunion” track in 1995. McCartney revealed that he’s finished with the track and plans to release it later this year.
“I don’t hear that much because I’m not on the internet that much, but people will say to me, oh yeah, there’s a track where John’s singing one of my songs, and it isn’t. It’s just AI. So all of that is kind of scary but exciting because it’s the future,” McCartney said.
He continued to mention the technology Peter Jackson used in his Get Back documentary, which tracked The Beatles as they made Let It Be. “He was able to extricate John’s voice from a rumpy little bit of cassette that had John’s voice and a piano.
“He could separate them with AI, and he could tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’ And he did that, so it has great uses.
“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had, that we worked on. We just finished it up. It’ll be released this year. We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure, through this AI, so then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”
You can listen to the full interview here.
Clarifying his comments that have concerned fans about a potential “AI Beatles” uprising, McCartney soothed listeners’ fears by writing on Twitter on 23 June, “Been great to see such an exciting response to our forthcoming Beatles project. No one is more excited than us to be sharing something with you later in the year.”
The Live And Let Die singer continued, “We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it. Seems to be a lot of guess work out there. Can’t say too much at this stage but 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.
“We hope you love it as much as we do. More news in due course”.
