Paul McCartney has clarified how artificial intelligence has been used to create a new Beatles song, saying that “nothing has been artificially or synthetically created”.
Last week, McCartney announced that he had employed AI technology on an unreleased Beatles demo from the 70s, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that AI had been used to “extricate” John Lennon’s voice from a cassette recording of the demo.
“We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI,” he said. “Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do. It gives you some sort of leeway.”
McCartney has since expanded on the process in a social media post after widespread coverage, amid concerns about how AI will affect the livelihood of artists in the future.
“We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it,” the musician wrote on Thursday afternoon. “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,” he wrote.
McCartney has not revealed the title or any lyrics from the song, which will be released later this year.
It is widely believed, however, to be a 1978 Lennon composition titled Now and Then. The song was included on a cassette labelled “For Paul” that Lennon had recorded shortly before his death in 1980.
Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, later gave the cassette to the three surviving Beatles in the 90s when they were working on their Anthology project – a retrospective of their career including three albums, a documentary and a book.
Two songs from that tape, Free as a Bird and Real Love, were officially released as part of Anthology, recorded by the Beatles using Lennon’s original voice recording.
But Now and Then was considered unsuitable for release at the time, with any recording attempts quickly abandoned by the band.
In a 1997 interview with Q Magazine, McCartney revealed that the song had been shelved because the late George Harrison had called it “fucking rubbish”.
“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,” he said. “[But] George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
The idea to use AI to reconstruct Lennon’s initial demo came from the filming process of Get Back, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Beatles docuseries which used similar AI technology to clean up the audio from archival Beatles footage by separating voices from background noise.
AI has become a particularly divisive topic in the music industry as of late. In April, an AI-produced song called Heart on My Sleeve went viral for simulating the voices of Drake and the Weeknd. Universal Media Group, home to both artists, successfully petitioned to have the song removed from streaming services – though the track sent shock waves of discourse surrounding ethics and intellectual property through the industry.
Many other instances of AI-generated covers of popular songs have spread across the internet, replicating the voices of singers including Harry Styles, Rihanna and Kanye West.
Some musicians have embraced AI technology. In April, Grimes invited others to create new songs using her voice, offering to split royalties on any AI-generated track that succeeded commercially.
In the BBC interview earlier this month, McCartney called AI both “scary” and “exciting”.
“It’s something we’re all sort of tackling at the moment and trying to deal with,” he said. “It’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads.”
