LONDON, June 13. /TASS/. Sir Paul McCartney, co-founder of one of the most popular rock bands of the 20th century, The Beatles, announced the release of the band’s "final song," created with the use of artificial intelligence technology.
In an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, the musician said that the song will be released this year.
McCartney did not name the song but the BBC assumes that this is likely to be "Now and Then," recorded by John Lennon in 1978.
Almost 15 years after Lennon was killed in New York in December 1980, McCartney received a demo from Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono. It was one of several songs on a cassette labeled "For Paul," the BBC wrote.
Among the songs on the tape were "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love," which were released as singles in 1995 and ended up on the first and second parts of the Anthology album, released in 1995 and 1996.
Lennon's vocals from the cassette were mixed with a musical theme put together by Paul McCarthy, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, and with their voices.
The band members attempted to record a studio version of "Now and Then" as well, but ran into a slew of difficulties all at once. Harrison called the song very weak and did not want to work on the unfinished piece. In addition, the quality of the recording made by Lennon on the tape recorder was poor, and the musician's voice was very difficult to separate from the background noise. According to McCartney, he returned to the abandoned project after filming the documentary "The Beatles: Get Back" by New Zealand-born director Peter Jackson.
AI help
"He [Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette, - McCartney told BBC, - 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". So, when we came to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI. Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do," he explained.
The musician confessed that sometimes thinking about what AI technology is capable of scares him.
"I am not on the internet that much [but] people will say to me, "Oh, yeah, there is a track where John is singing one of my songs" and it is just AI, you know? It is a kind of scary but exciting, because it is the future. We’ll have to see where that leads," Paul said.
McCartney's interview was timed to coincide with the release of his book of photographs "Eyes of the Storm" and the opening of a photo exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The edition, which hit stores on Tuesday, collects pictures McCartney took with his camera in 1963-1964 during The Beatles' tour of Europe and the United States. A forgotten archive of almost a thousand photos was discovered in 2020.