Paul McCartney: “New unreleased Beatles thanks to artificial intelligence”
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Paul McCartney has said he used artificial intelligence to help create what he calls “the last Beatles record”. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he explained that machine learning technology was used to ‘extract’ John Lennon’s vocals from an old demo so he could complete the song. “We just finished it and it’s coming out this year,” he said. Macca did not name the song, but everything suggests that it is a 1978 composition by Lennon entitled Now and then.
The demo left by Lennon
It was already being considered as a possible Beatles reunion song in 1995 when Paul, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were working on the series Anthologywhich then led to the release of the singles Free as a bird And real love. McCartney had received the demo a year earlier from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono. It was one of several songs on a cassette labeled “For Paul” that Lennon had made shortly before his tragic death in 1980.
An outtake from «Anthology»
The tracks, recorded on the piano via a portable tape recorder while the musician sat at the piano in his Dakota Building apartment, were remastered by Jeff Lynne, genius of the Electric Light Orchestra as well as personal friend and late producer of George. The band also tried to record the love song Now and then but the session was quickly abandoned. “The song had a chorus but almost no verses at all,” Lynne explained. “We did the backing track, a rough job that we didn’t finish.”
Harrison’s Doubts
Macca later claimed that Harrison had declared the song “trash” and refused to work on it. «It didn’t have a good title, it needed to be reworked, but it had a beautiful verse sung by John. George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t make it.” Additionally, the original recording had a persistent hum. In 2009, a new version of the demo, without the background noise, was released on a bootleg CD. McCartney has repeatedly spoken of his desire to finish the song. It seems that technology has given the musician the ability to achieve this.
Get Beck technology
The turning point would come with the documentary Get Back by Peter Jackson, where dialogue editor Emile de la Rey trained computers to recognize the Beatles’ voices and separate them from background noise, and even from their own instruments, to create “clean” audio. The same process allowed McCartney to “duet” with Lennon on his recent su tour I’v got a feeling and to create new surround mixes of the album revolvers by the Beatles last year. And now he could give us a new unreleased Beatles. A doubt arises: to Lennon – author of Now and then – would you have liked such an operation? It’s really true: artificial intelligence brings with it decisive questions for mankind.
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