Paul McCartney clears up confusion about use of AI in new Beatles’ track
Sir Paul McCartney is making it clear that AI didn’t make the new Beatles’ song.
Last week in an interview with BBC Radio 4, the “Yesterday” artist said artificial intelligence technology has enabled him and his producers to create “the last Beatles record” by pulling the late John Lennon‘s voice from demo tapes.
McCartney’s announcement predictably caused what the singer dubbed “some confusion and speculation” on Twitter this week.
“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,” he wrote. “It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings — a process which has gone on for years.”
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The “Band on the Run” musician added, “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. … We hope you love it as much as we do. More news in due course.”
The track, which McCartney did not name, is believed to be “Now and Then,” an unfinished 1978 Lennon recording taped in the slain singer’s New York City apartment.
“We’ve just finished it up and it will be released this year,” McCartney, 80, shared with BBC 4. “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.”
In 1995, the three then-living Beatles — McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — reunited to record new tracks as part of the multimedia retrospective project “The Beatles Anthology.” The songs came to life thanks to Lennon‘s demo tapes given to McCartney by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, a year prior.
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The sessions resulted in the release of the singles “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” in 1995 and 1996, respectively. But there was one song that the group famously couldn’t agree on and eventually shelved: “Now and Then.”
Since then, the song has been a passion project for McCartney.
In a 2012 BBC documentary about Electric Light Orchestra musician Jeff Lynne — who produced the “Anthology” sessions — McCartney spoke about his desire to finish and release the record with Lynne.
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“There was another [track] that we started working on, but George went off it,” McCartney said of the recordings in the doc. “That one’s still lingering around, so I’m gonna nick in with Jeff and do it — finish it one of these days.”
In a 2021 New Yorker interview, the “Live and Let Die” songwriter reiterated his intention to finish “Now and Then,” despite Harrison having called it “f— rubbish.”
The “Hey Jude” musician regained hope for completing the track after working with director Peter Jackson on the 2021 Beatles documentary series “Get Back.”
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“He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette, where it had John’s voice and a piano,” McCartney said in last week’s interview. “He could separate them, with AI they could do it. They tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’ And he did that.”
While he is thankful for AI’s ability to assist in the long-awaited song, McCartney still finds some aspects of the technology off-putting.
“People will say to me there’s a track where John’s singing one of my songs and it isn’t — it’s just AI, you know?” he said. “So all of that is kinda scary, but exciting ‘cause it’s the future. ... So there’s a good side to it and then a scary side, and we just have to see where that leads.”
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