Paul McCartney Used AI to Make a Final Beatles Song — But Not in a Creepy Way
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Paul McCartney has (sort of) got the Beatles back together for one more song with the help of artificial intelligence.
First, to clarify: No, McCartney did not feed a machine a whole bunch of John Lennon and/or George Harrison material, get the computer to spit out some goofy, cheap hall of mirrors imitation, and then mold that into something with Ringo Starr. Rather, as McCartney explained to the BBC, AI tech was used to “extricate” Lennon’s vocals from an old demo, which was then used to complete the song.
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Per McCartney, the new song was made with the help of Peter Jackson, using the same AI-based “de-mixing” technology that was essential to the epic three-part Beatles doc Get Back. One of the marvels of the film was the way Jackson and his team were able to isolate and separate individual voices and instruments from each other and the general murk of the original tapes, effectively recovering and restoring a plethora of conversations and performances. (The same tech was also used on last year’s Revolver reissue.)
“We were able to use that kind of thing when Peter Jackson did the film Get Back,” McCartney said. “He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette — it had John’s voice and a piano — he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar.’ And he did that. So it has great uses.”
When it came to making what McCartney called “the last Beatles record,” he said, “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… So there’s a good side to it and a scary side — and we’ll just have to see where that leads.”
McCartney said the song would be “released this year” but didn’t give an exact date. He also didn’t give away the title of the song, though it seems highly likely that it’ll be Lennon’s apocryphal, unfinished 1978 tune, “Now and Then.”
The track was one of several songs on a cassette Lennon made before his death in 1980. In the Nineties, Yoko Ono gave the tape to McCartney, and a couple of other tunes on it — “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” — were fixed up by McCartney, Harrison, Starr, and producer Jeff Lynne, and included as “reunion songs” on The Beatles Anthology compilation. While “Now and Then” was also considered at the time, McCartney later said Harrison refused to work on it because the quality of Lennon’s vocals was “rubbish.”
But McCartney was always eager to finish the song. In a 2012 BBC Four doc, he said, “That one’s still lingering around. So I’m going to nick in with Jeff [Lynne] and do it. Finish it one of these days.”
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