The "Last" Beatles Song Will Be Released One Week From Today (November 2nd)
A few months ago, Paul McCartney teased that a "new" Beatles song (one that had been completed with the help of AI technology) would be coming soon/out this year....
The song has now been confirmed as "Now and Then" - a John Lennon demo that was left in a box labeled “For Paul.” when he died....
Like I said when I initially blogged it - when I heard that a new "Beatles AI" song was on the way, I was reeeaaal worried.
Most of the AI covers we've heard in the last year range from bad to worse, and trying to recreate the voice of a Beatle using computers seems totally sacrilege. Luckily, though - that's not what the AI technology was used for….
Consequence of Sound- The idea came about after Emile de la Rey, the dialogue editor on Peter Jackson’s docuseries Get Back, used custom AI to recognize each Beatle’s voice in the footage so it could be separated from extraneous background noise: “[Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” McCartney said. “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.’”
He continued: “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. So it gives you some sort of leeway.”
So, despite the craze of phony AI tracks, this “new” song won’t use the technology to copy Lennon’s voice; it’ll just make what recordings already exist all the more useful. The result will mark The Beatles’ first “new” material in 25 years.
Modern AI tools allowed McCartney to extract and isolate Lennon's vocals from the original demo, cleaning up the existing recording - and then he went to work on the instrumentation.
Sue McKay. Getty Images.
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Obviously, McCartney enlisted fellow Beatle Ringo Starr to play drums on the track; and the trailer above suggests that George Harrison played on it as well! How that was accomplished, I'm not quite sure - but my first thought is that the surviving Beatles tried to finish this song back in 1995 when they recorded "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love" for the Beatles Anthology release….
….and Harrison's guitar tracks were saved and locked away in a vault until Paul decided to finish off "Now and Then" earlier this year. I could be totally off base, but that's the only explanation I could think of.
Time to get excited though - we've got a "new" Beatles song coming out a week from today. What a world.
Bettmann. Getty Images.P.S. Imagine telling somebody in the early 2000s that The Beatles will have the chance to knock blink-182 and the wheelchair kid from Degrassi off the charts with a new song in 2023?