Paul McCartney Says He Used AI to Produce a “Final” Beatles Song
More than 50 years after The Beatles broke up, and 40 years after the death of John Lennon, a new song from the British super group is set to be released this year — and it’s all thanks to artificial intelligence.
Paul McCartney revealed the news in a BBC radio interview Tuesday.
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“When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had,” McCartney said in the interview. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI. Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do.”
McCartney added that the new song will be released later this year.
The decision to try and finish the song was inspired by the 2021 Beatles documentary Get Back, which was directed by Peter Jackson.
McCartney told the BBC that Jackson “was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette.”
“We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI,” he added. “They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’”
Seeing that in action spurred McCartney on to try and produce the old demo, which he had received from Yoko Ono in the 1990s (when the Beatles were producing their Anthology albums) but had been deemed unreleasable.
It is not entirely clear what the final song is, though the BBC speculates it is a 1978 Lennon piece called Now And Then.
The new song will be the first “new” Beatles project since the band released Free As A Bird and Real Love as part of the Anthology albums.
As for the use of AI in the music world, McCartney said it is “kind of scary and exciting,” but added: “It’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads.”
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