As hard as it is to believe, The Beatles have a new song coming out this year.
Yes, you read that correctly. There is a new Beatles song on the way, and it’ll be the last one the band ever releases.
With the use of artificial intelligence, the legendary rock band will be brought back to life for the first time since the 1990s when two previously unheard Beatles songs were released, per NBC News.
If you’re wondering how AI has found its way into bringing new Beatles music to fans for the first time in nearly three decades, it all goes back to a recent documentary project on the band spearheaded by filmmaker Peter Jackson.
How did this new song come to be?
Beatles frontman Paul McCartney recently detailed how Jackson was able to use AI to extract John Lennon’s voice after the Lord of the Rings director led the sprawling Disney+ documentary project The Beatles: Get Back.
“All that is kind of scary but also exciting because it’s the future,” McCartney told BBC Radio 4 about AI, per NBC News.
“And [Jackson] he was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little cassette that had John’s voice and a piano. He could separate them with AI — he could tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice, that’s the guitar, lose the guitar.’ And he did that, so it has great uses.
“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo John had, that we worked on and just finished it up. It’ll be released this year. 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.”
When is the last time we've had new Beatles music?
The last time that The Beatles released new music post-disbanding in the 1970s was in the mid-1990s.
The songs “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love” were released in 1995 and 1996, respectively, as part of the group’s Anthology compilations.
When “Free As A Bird” came out in 1995, it was the first new Beatles song released in 25 years.
“Both [songs] were painstakingly constructed around crackly demos recorded at home in New York City by Lennon in the late 1970s,” NBC News reported.
“Ringo Starr and George Harrison collaborated with McCartney and producer Jeff Lynne on both songs, with Lennon’s voice reduced to a whispery echo due to the deterioration of the tape and the low quality of the recording, which was never intended to be released.”
When can we hear the new song?
McCartney told BBC that “we just finished it up and it’ll be released this year.”
The song’s name isn’t yet known, but it will indeed have vocals from Lennon on the track that AI have helped unearth.
