Sir Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence helped him create a final Beatles song. According to McCartney, he built the new song from a John Lennon demo tape. “We just finished it up, it will be released this year,” McCartney told BBC Radio 4’s Today. He was on the show to promote his photo book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm.
“When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on,” he said during the interview. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so that then we could mix the record as you would normally do — it gives you some sort of leeway. So there’s a good side to it and then a scary side and we’ll just have to see where that leads.”
So, how did he get so comfy with AI? Through a friend. McCartney says director Peter Jackson, who worked on The Beatles’ 2021 documentary Get Back, showed him how AI could be used in the studio to make music.
“He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette — it had John’s voice and a piano,” McCartney said. “He could separate them with AI, they could tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar,’ and he did that. So it has great uses.”
The last time McCartney worked on retro Beatles material was back in 1994. At that time, he, Ringo Starr and George Harrison got back together to work on two incomplete Lennon demos: “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” The Beatles released the tracks in 1995 and 1996 on the Anthology 1 and Anthology 2 sets.
