Ringo Starr defends The Beatles’ new single: “This is absolutely John Lennon’s voice”
Ringo Starr has broken his silence on The Beatles‘ forthcoming single and confirmed it “is absolutely John Lennon’s voice” on the track rather than an inauthentic version created by artificial intelligence.
Last month, Paul McCartney confirmed The Beatles will release one “last” song later this year with the help of AI. During an interview with the BBC, McCartney explained: “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.”
“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 added.
McCartney later clarified the usage of AI, which was only used to clean up recordings and confirmed Lennon’s authentic voice was used on the new track. “Been great to see such an exciting response to our forthcoming Beatles project. No one is more excited than us to be sharing something with you later in the year,” McCartney wrote on Twitter.
“We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it. Seems to be a lot of guess work out there. Can’t say too much at this stage but to be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created,” McCartney added.
“It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings – a process which has gone on for years. We hope you love it as much as we do. More news in due course,” he concluded.
Now, in a new interview with People, Starr opened up about the upcoming release, commenting: “This is absolutely John Lennon’s voice, taken off, as neat as we can, a cassette. And that’s all I can tell you!”
In the same interview, Starr also reflected on the legacy of The Beatles: “There’s an interview of the four of us — Paul was going to write songs, George was going to have a garage, and I was going to have a hairdresser. We thought that’s what we’d be doing, and it would last three or four years, but it lasted eight and we did a lot of great tracks.”
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