Paul McCartney explains his latest reveal regarding an upcoming “final” Beatles record.
After the 81-year-old McCartney emerged in an interview with BBC Radio 4 Today’s Best Last week, AI was used to “remove” the voice of former bandmate John Lennon from an old demo, now making it clear that the four original Beatles are indeed playing on the upcoming song.
“It’s great to see such an exciting response to our upcoming Beatles project. No one is more excited than we are to share something with you later in the year,” McCartney wrote on Twitter.
“We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about this. There seems to be a lot of guesswork out there,” he continued. “I can’t say much at this stage but to be clear, nothing was created artificially or synthetically.”
“It’s totally real and we’re all playing on it. We’ve cleared some existing records – it’s been a process for years.”
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McCartney’s final statement about the upcoming project comes a week after he said the project “will be released this year.” As he explained at the time, decades after the singer-songwriter was shot dead at age 40 in December 1980, AI was used to “eliminate” Lennon’s voice.
“It was a demo of John that we were working on,” McCartney said. “Through this AI, we were able to take John’s voice and refine it. Then we could mix the recording like you normally would. So it gives you a kind of space.”
Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson did something similar in his 2021 documentary series. The Beatles: Come Back, McCartney explained. The project involved the making of the important 1970 album. Let it be.
“We were able to use these kinds of things when Peter Jackson did it,” McCartney said. “He can separate them with artificial intelligence. He can say to the machine, ‘This is a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar.’ And it did. So it has great uses.”
The BBC reported that the song was a 1978 track titled “Now and Then” that Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, recorded on a stereo shortly before his death and gave McCartney on a tape labeled “For Paul”. ”
The Beatles attempted to record the song for the Anthology series in 1995, but George Harrison, who died in 2001 at the age of 58, complained that the sound quality was “garbage”.
“It didn’t have a very good title, it needed some rework, but it had a good line and John sang it,” McCartney said. Q Magazine in 1997. “[But] George didn’t like it. We didn’t do it because the Beatles are a democracy.”
McCartney’s statement came when AI-generated music took over TikTok and social media, and the Recording Academy issued a statement outlining its stance on the matter.
“Only human creators are eligible to be considered, nominated, or earn a Grammy Award for a Grammy Award,” the Academy said in a statement. “A work without human authorship is not eligible in any category.”
However, the statement states, “A study that includes elements of artificial intelligence material (that is, material produced using artificial intelligence technology) is eligible in the applicable categories.”