Sir Paul McCartney, bassist, singer and leader of the Beatles, officially announces that a new composition, hitherto unfinished and including the voice of John Lennon, should be released in this year 2023 thanks to artificial intelligence.
Let us simply recall that John Lennon was assassinated in New York on December 8, 1980 and that he is not able to sing from Heaven (really?), any more than Steve Jobs is able to speak.
The Beatles’ latest album will include a new contribution from John Lennon
What if one of the greatest musical groups of all time came up with a new musical creation thanks to artificial intelligence? This is announced on June 13, 2023 by Sir Paul McCartney at the microphone of the BBC. To come back to the origin of this project, we have to go back to the year 1978 and to a music called, according to the BBC, Now And Then. However, McCartney did not confirm during his interview that it is indeed this track.
Now And Then is however not a name unknown to fans of the British rock band. Indeed, it is a title composed by John Lennon, but never completed, the latter having been assassinated 42 years ago. Several months before his death, Lennon had nevertheless taken the time to record several demos, namely versions of Now And Then among other titles, in piano voice, without this work having ever been completed.
Now And Then was passed along, like other demos, by Yoko Ono to Paul McCartney. It had been recorded on a tape called ” For Paul [McCartney, ndlr] “. The piece should have appeared, among other things, on the group’s autobiographical project, The Beatles Anthology (1995), which marked the first production of new material since the band split up in 1970. Lacking satisfying verses and recording quality poor in Lennon’s voice, according to George Harrison, Now And Then is left in the closet.
Still on the subject of recording quality, a permanent background buzz, linked to the acoustics of the apartment in which Lennon recorded the song, could not be corrected in mixing until 2009, when a been released a new demo of Now And Then with a back track. With the explosion of possibilities offered by AI, the next step has been taken, and one wonders what Deezer will think of it.
A key role played by… Peter Jackson
Paul McCartney has detailed the technological revolution that will make it possible to achieve Now And Then before the end of 2023. It all started with the filming and production of a documentary on the Beatles by Peter Jackson, The Beatles: Get Back. The New Zealand director, known in particular for his adaptation of the trilogy of Lord of the Ringsthen works with his dialogue editor Emile de la Rey with the aim of training artificial intelligence to recognize the voices of the Beatles, so as to be able to separate these voices from the sound of an instrument or background noise.
At the microphone of BBCMcCartney explains that Peter Jackson “ managed to extract John’s voice from a small piece of tape. We had John’s voice and a piano, and he could separate them with the AI. […] So when we got to do what will be the last Beatles album, […] we were able to take John’s voice and make it pure with this AI “. By reusing this process, Sir Paul McCartney was notably able to sing “in duet” with Lennon during his last solo tour, for example during the Glastonbury festival in 2022 on I’ve Got a Feeling.
John Lennon therefore made his return to the studio, in spite of himself. The use of AI has been very useful to McCartney, without this preventing him from expressing a reservation on its use: “ I’m not very present on the Internet, [cependant] people will say to me, “Oh, yeah, there’s a track where John sings one of my songs”, and it’s just AI, you know?
It’s kind of scary, but also exciting, because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where it leads. As for the ethical or financial questions of this new Beatles musical project, we leave you to be the judge.
Sources: BBC, The Guardian
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