Tomorrow may never know what AI will bring in the distant future, but one thing it will produce in the soon-to-be present is “new” Beatles music.
Once, there was a time that four lads from Liverpool performed their own songs. But apparently, with the help of artificial intelligence, the decades of no new Beatles music have come to an end.
Paul McCartney announced that thanks to AI, The Beatles will be releasing a new song complete with vocals from John Lennon, who died more than 40 years ago.
McCartney told BBC Radio 4 recently that “the final Beatles record” will be produced using technology to remaster Lennon’s voice from an old demo.
“We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” the 80-year-old songwriter said.
McCartney didn’t say what the song was, but the BBC speculated that it was a 1978 Lennon-penned song called “Now And Then.”
BBC reported that the song was already floated as a possible reunion song when, in 1995, the remaining members of the band were working on their “Anthology” releases.
“Now And Then” was on a cassette given to McCartney by Lennon’s widow with the simple message written on it by McCartney’s former partner — “For Paul.” The recordings were made into a boombox as Lennon sat at a piano shortly before his 1980 murder.
Two songs were released in 1995 and 1996: “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love,” the first new Beatles music released in a quarter century.
They tried to record “Now And Then” but it didn’t work out, with McCartney later saying that George Harrison at the time had called the sound quality of Lennon’s track “rubbish,” BBC reported.
Harrison died in 2001, so it is unknown if the band had any similar tracks of him performing any part of “Now And Then,” NBC News reported. It is unclear if Harrison will be part of the new AI-generated release.
NBC News reported that, with the tape’s deterioration and its low quality to begin with, Lennon’s voice was a whispery echo. There was also a buzzing background attributed to electrical circuits in Lennon’s apartment.
It seemed all was lost until Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” documentary. A computer learned the sounds of each of the bandmates and was used to separate their voices from background noises. It was even able to separate the voices from the musical instruments.
The computer also allowed faded film footage from the making of the “Let it Be” album and their final performance on top of Apple Corps headquarters in January 1969 to be regenerated into something that was able to be used, bringing the band back to life, NBC News reported.
The technology was then used to allow McCartney to sing with his long-dead friend during McCartney’s appearance at Glastonbury in 2022.
“We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar,’” McCartney explained.
McCartney admits that the use of AI is still new.
“I’m not on the internet that much [but] people will say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s a track where John’s singing one of my songs’, and it’s just AI, you know?
“It’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads,” he told the BBC.
NBC News reported that many artists’ sounds have been recreated by AI, including that of The Beatles. A song that used voices generated by AI of The Weeknd and Drake was removed from streaming services earlier this year.
A release date for the forthcoming song from The Beatles has not yet been announced, Billboard reported.