A new Beatles song is coming together with a little help from AI, according to Paul McCartney.
Artificial intelligence made it possible to turn a decades-old demo recording by John Lennon into “what will be the last Beatles record,” McCartney told BBC Radio 4′s “Today.”
“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,” McCartney said. “It gives you some sort of leeway. There’s a good side to [artificial intelligence], and then a scary side. We just have to see where that leads.”
McCartney, 80, said the record was recently finished and will be released later this year. He didn’t share the song’s title, though the BBC suggested its likely a Lennon composition, “Now and Then,” from 1978.
Director Peter Jackson also employed AI technology when he made the 2021 documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” which uses archival footage of the band recording the 1970 album “Let It Be.”
“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 told BBC Radio 4 of Jackson. “He could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice. That’s a guitar. Lose the guitar.’”
“Let It Be” was the final album released by the Beatles. Lennon put “Now and Then” on a cassette for McCartney shortly before his death in 1980, and the song was considered for but ultimately not included in the Beatles’ “Anthology” series in 1995, according to the BBC.
McCartney reportedly once told Q Magazine that fellow Beatles member George Harrison considered the sound quality of Lennon’s voice on “Now and Then” to be “rubbish” so the band decided against reworking it.
“It didn’t have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it,” McCartney told the magazine, according to the BBC.
“[But] George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
