The Beatles will release a new song this year with vocals from John Lennon, according to Paul McCartney, who revealed the news on Tuesday. This is a surprise that fans of the Fab Four believed they would never hear.
The band, whose cultural impact may have been unsurpassed in the 20th century, will release “the final Beatles record” this year, according to McCartney, who is 80. Using cutting-edge technology, Lennon’s voice was extracted from an old demo tape. “We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” McCartney said.
Since the 1995 and 1996 releases of “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” which were both painstakingly built on crackly demos taken at Lennon’s house in New York City in the late 1970s, the band’s new song, which as of yet has no name, will be their first original composition.
Lennon’s voice was reduced to a whispery echo due to the deterioration of the tape and the poor quality of the recording, which was never intended to be published, and was co-written by Ringo Starr and George Harrison alongside McCartney and producer Jeff Lynne.
Both songs were regarded to be the last works by a band whose “Anthology” compilations ranged their entire career and whose estimated 600 million album sales make them the most successful musical act of all time.
However, Peter Jackson, the director of the film, has now restored the dated audio track and created what may be a significantly superior sound using cutting-edge technology. In order to transform distorted, faded film footage into the epic eight-hour “Get Back” TV series that followed the recording of the “Let It Be” album and the band’s illustrious final performance on top of Apple Corps headquarters in London’s West End in January 1969, he invented audio-visual AI technology.
One of the most debated issues in the music industry is AI. In April, a song containing the digitally produced voices of The Weeknd and Drake was removed from streaming services. AI technologies have been used to recreate or build upon the work of several bands, including the Beatles.
Regarding how artificial intelligence is transforming music, McCartney remarked, “All that is kind of scary but also exciting because it’s the future.”
“And [Jackson] he was able to separate them with AI — 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 AI so then we could mix the record as you would normally do.” McCartney continued.
The band’s devoted followers anticipate the song to be called “Now and Then,” a Lennon tune created around the same time as his “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” demos and probably found on a cassette the late John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, sent to McCartney in 1994.
Harrison disliked “Now and Then,” so although it was taken into consideration, it wasn’t added to the “Anthology” project, according to McCartney. It has allegedly since appeared on bootleg CDs; however, this has not been verified by fans.
“The song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track.” According to a 2005 Washington Post article, Jeff Lynne remarked in 1995 that the album was “a rough go that we didn’t really finish.”
In a 2006 interview with Q magazine, McCartney said: “There was one more that we didn’t do, which was a pity. 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. But George didn’t wanna do it.”
It is unknown if Harrison, who passed away in 2001, may have contributed to the song before it was shelved in 1995 and would make any appearances in it.
McCartney’s mind has been tormented by the song. According to the BBC, he stated in a 2012 documentary on Lynne, “That one’s still lingering around.” “So I’m going to nick in with Jeff and do it. Finish it, one of these days.”
At the Glastonbury music festival in June 2022, McCartney and Lennon were able to perform a live “duet” while singing along to a lone vocal track from 1969 because of Jackson’s innovative technology.
In his ninth decade, McCartney is still very active. He is supporting an exhibition of candid photos of the Beatles from their heyday in 1963–1964 that is presently on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The photos were thought to be stolen or lost until they were recently found.
