Sir Paul McCartney announces new Beatles song using Artificial Intelligence

In an interview with BBC’s Radio 4 programme Today, Sir Paul McCartney has said that ‘the last Beatles’ record will released later this year and that they have just finished it up.

Sir Paul has said that John Lennon’s vocals were removed from an old demo using AI. Sir Paul did not name the song but BBC’s Mark Savage suspects that it is the song ‘Now And Then’ which was composed by John Lennon.

Sir Paul had received the demo in 1994 from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono. It was one of several songs on a cassette labelled “For Paul” that Lennon had made shortly before his death in 1980.

Producer Jeff Lynne cleaned up the songs and two of those songs ‘Free as a bird’ and ‘Real love’ were completed and released in 1995 and 96. The group had also tried to record ‘Now And Then’ but the session was soon abandoned, as Sir Paul later claimed that George Harrison had declared the song “rubbish” and refused to work on it and since the Beatles were a democracy, they dropped the plan. It was also said that there were technical issues such as a persistent ‘buzz’ sound.

A new version of the demo without the background noise was released on a bootleg CD in 2009 to which fans have suggested that this version was not available in 1995 when the group had tried to record the song ‘Now And Then’ but was stolen from John Lennon’s apartment along with many of his personal belongings after his death.

However modern technology has given Sir Paul the chance to finally record the song which he has wanted to do for a long time. Peter Jackson’s ‘Get Back’ documentary’s dialogue editor trained the computers to recognise the Beatles’ voices and separate them from background noises, and even their own instruments, to create “clean” audio. This was very well the process which has allowed Sir Paul to achieve his goal.

“He [Peter Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” Sir Paul told Radio 4’s Martha Kearney.

“We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar’.

“So, when we came to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] 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. So, it gives you some sort of leeway.”

The musician also raised concerns over AI and technology saying, “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’s just AI, you know?

It’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads.”