A.I. is one of the most controversial topics in the music industry. A.I. tools have been used to recreate or expand on the work of many bands, including the Beatles, and a song featuring the digitally-created voices of The Weeknd and Drake was taken off streaming services in April.
“All that is kind of scary but also exciting because it’s the future,” McCartney said of the way A.I. is changing music.
“And [Jackson] he was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little cassette that had John’s voice and a piano. He could separate them with A.I. — he could tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice, that’s 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 John had, that we worked on and just finished it up. It’ll be released this year. We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this A.I. so then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”
While the song name has yet to be confirmed, the band’s many obsessive fans expect it to be “Now and Then,” a Lennon composition made around the same time as his “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” demos and likely to have been on a cassette Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, sent McCartney in 1994.
McCartney has said that Harrison disliked “Now and Then,” so it wasn’t included in the Anthology project despite being considered. Fans have claimed it has since appeared on bootleg CDs, although this has not been confirmed.
“The song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn’t finish,” McCartney told Q, a British rock magazine, in 2006.
“It didn’t have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it,” he said. “[But] George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
It is unclear whether the song will feature any contribution from Harrison, who died in 2001 but may have worked on the song before it was abandoned in 1995.
The song has preyed on McCartney’s mind. He told a BBC documentary on Jeff Lynne in 2012: “That one’s still lingering around. So I’m going to nick in with Jeff and do it. Finish it, one of these days.”
Jackson’s pioneering technology allowed McCartney to “duet” with Lennon live at Glastonbury music festival in June 2022, singing along to an isolated vocal track from 1969.
McCartney remains busy in his ninth decade and is promoting an exhibition of candid photographs of the Beatles in their 1963-4 heyday, currently on show at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
The photos were considered lost or stolen but were recently rediscovered.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
