In a BBC Radio interview earlier this month, Paul McCartney said the The Beatles’ latest song was made with the help of artificial intelligence and will be released this year. On social media this week, the singer said there was confusion about the song because it was not “artificially or synthetically created”.
McCartney, 80, told BBC Radio’s Martha Kearney that in the 2021 documentary ‘The Beatles: Get Back’, which looks at the making of the band’s 1970 album ‘Let It Be’, an engineer from the sound used AI to extract vocals from background music. “We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with the AI. They say to the machine, ‘That’s the voice. It’s a guitar. Lose the guitar,'” McCartney said.
“When we came to do what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John (Lennon) had that we worked on. And we just finished it, it’s coming out this year,” he said. he declares. “We were able to take John’s voice and make it pure with this AI so we could mix the record like you normally would.”
It was great to see such an exciting response to our next Beatles project. No one is more excited than us to share something with you later this year.
We have seen some confusion and speculation about this. There seems to be a lot of guesswork there. I can’t say too much…
— Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) June 22, 2023
In social media posts on Thursday, McCartney further explained that “nothing was artificially or synthetically created” for the song and “we’re all playing on it,” explaining that for years they’ve been “cleaning up existing recordings “.
The band broke up in 1970, and Lennon died in 1980 at age 40 after being shot outside his apartment building in New York City; Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001 at the age of 58. McCartney and Ringo Starr, 82, are the two remaining band members.
It’s possible that the recording they “cleaned up” for the new song came from a recording Lennon made in 1978 called “Now and Then.” Before he died, Lennon recorded a demo tape he titled “For Paul”, which his widow, Yoko Ono, gave to McCartney in 1995, according to BBC News.
McCartney and Jeff Lynne reproduced two of the songs, creating the posthumous tracks “Free As A Bird”, released in 1995, and “Real Love”, released in 1996, as part of his in-depth anthology retrospective.
“Now and Then” is another song on the tape that the Beatles planned to release in 1995.