Paul McCartney to release one “last” song by The Beatles later this year
Paul McCartney has confirmed The Beatles will release one “last” song later this year. The track was recently finished with the help of artificial intelligence.
“It’s a very interesting thing,” he said of the involvement of artificial intelligence in the music industry during an interview on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Today Show. “It’s something we are all tackling at the moment and trying to deal with what’s it mean, y’know. I don’t hear that much because I’m not on the internet that much but people will tell me there’s a track where John (Lennon) is singing one of my songs. It isn’t, it’s just AI, y’now. So all of that is kind of scary, but exciting because it’s the future,” he continued.
McCartney then explained how they’ve been able to use this technology to restore old material by Lennon and turn it into a composition by The Beatles. “We were able to use that kind of thing when Peter Jackson did the film Get Back, it was us making the Let It Be album. He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” he said.
“He could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice, this is the guitar, lose the guitar.’ And he did that, so it has great uses. So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record it was a demo that John had that we worked on and we’ve just finished it up, it’ll be released this year,” McCartney revealed.
“We were able to get John’s voice and make it pure through AI and then we could mix the record, as you would normally do,” he concluded.
Although McCartney didn’t reveal the name of the track in question, it’s mooted to be ‘Now And Then’, which was demoed by Lennon in 1978 and has previously been under consideration to be released by The Beatles. However, this is yet to be confirmed.
McCartney was speaking ahead of the launch of the upcoming exhibition, Paul McCartney, 1964: Eyes of the Storm, at the National Portrait Gallery. From June 28th to October 1st, 2023, the gallery will display 250 unseen photographs taken by Paul of his bandmates and the cities they travelled to during their 1963-64 tour.
The images were taken on Paul’s personal Pentax camera and will also be available in an accompanying photobook titled 1964: Eyes of the Storm, slated for release on June 13th via Penguin. He will also be discussing the book at the National Portrait Gallery with actor Stanley Tucci on June 29th.
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