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Paul McCartney has confirmed The Beatles are going to release their “final” song in the coming months.
The 80-year-old member of the Fab Four told BBC Radio 4 today that artificial intelligence has been used to “extricate” John Lennon’s voice from an old Beatles demo.
This voice data has since been used to complete the song in question, allowing the star to release what he has called the “final Beatles record” of all time.
McCartney said Get Back director Peter Jackson “was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette”.
“We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI,” he explained. “They tell the machine. ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar’. 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.”
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McCartney added: “We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year.”
The Hey Jude singer did not name the track, but BBC reports it may be a track the band worked on in 1995.
The new and final Beatles song could likely be Now And Then.
This song was already considered a “reunion” song for the band in 1995 while they were pulling together their career retrospective project The Beatles Anthology.
McCartney received the demo of Now And Then the year before Anthology was created when he was visited by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.
Ono gave McCartney a cassette tape in 1994 labelled “For Paul”, which included a number of songs written and recorded by Lennon before his assassination in 1980.
The songs were reportedly recorded on a boombox as Lennon sat at a piano nearby in his New York apartment.
However, George Harrison didn’t think Now And Then met The Beatles’ standards, so was ultimately scrapped in the 1990s.
McCartney later explained Harrison called the track “rubbish”.
“It didn’t have a very good title,” he went on. “It needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it. [But] George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
