The Beatles are getting back together for a new song this year — with a little help from AI. It’s been over five decades since the group disbanded and around 30 years since their last collaboration for the Anthology album in the mid-90s.
John Lennon may have died about 40 years ago, but they plan to resurrect the singer-songwriter’s voice for the last Beatles recording. This is according to Paul McCartney’s interview with the BBC Radio 4 program.
Of the original Fab Four Beatles members, Sir Paul McCartney, 81, and Sir Ringo Starr, 82, are the only members still alive today — and musically active. Sadly, John Lennon was murdered in 1980, while George Harrison died in 2001 from lung cancer.
One last Beatle song
In the interview with BBC, McCartney said that their song would probably be released in 2023. He didn’t tell the interviewers the name of their new music, but BBC’s Mark Savage believes it will be Now and Then, a song John Lennon recorded in 1978, two years before he was killed.
Lennon recorded the song (and several others) in a cassette using a boombox and a piano in his apartment. He had labeled “For Paul” on this cassette, and his widow, Yoko Ono, later gave it to McCartney.
In the mid-90s (1995 and 1996), The Beatles released two songs from the cassette — Free as a Bird and Real Love. However, the band did not manage to record a version of Now and Then and eventually abandoned it.
“It didn’t have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse, and it had John singing it,” McCartney told Q Magazine in 2006. “[But] George [Harrison] didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
But now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, they believe they can.
McCartney’s inspiration for giving life to Lennon’s voice
The inspiration to extract Lennon’s voice — and record a new song using AI — came from a documentary, Get Back, about the band led by filmmaker Peter Jackson in 2021.
While making this documentary, dialogue editor Emile de la Rey used AI tech to extricate band members’ voices from background noises. According to McCartney, this tech enabled them to “take John’s voice and get it pure.”
“He [Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette. 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 told BBC Radio 4’s Today.
This “source-separated” AI voice has also allowed McCartney to sing a duet with Lennon’s voice in his latest tour.
A tribute to Lennon and his fans
McCartney and Peter Jackson have the keys to the original AI music by the Beatles. Still, fans and enterprising guys have been using AI on Beatles songs — even unreleased ones. For instance, Dae Lims, a YouTuber, used the tech to “de-age” McCartney’s voice for his 2013 hit release New. He also tweaked Lennon’s voice from his 1980 song Grow Old With Me to make it sound like it was released at the height of Beatlemania.
That said, most AI-inspired Beatles music from fans is always taken down because of copyright issues with Universal Music Group. But fans won’t have to wait long for the original as McCartney plans to give Lennon, other band members, and their fans a lasting tribute.
“We just finished it up, and it’ll be released this year,” he says.
As mentioned, the band had tried to release Now and Then during the recording of Anthology. That means they still have some recordings from George Harrison, among other deceased band members. Add some Ringo Starr magic and an authentic AI-created Beatles track.
Though it will enable a posthumous Beatles collaboration, McCartney has mixed feelings about artificial intelligence. “It’s kind of scary but exciting because it’s the future,” he says. “We’ll just have to see where that leads.”
