A New Beatles Song? We’ll Take It!

by Kevin Burton

   From a beloved uncle or a dear friend who has passed away, you find a previously unknown letter. How precious is that?

   It’s a piece of that person that you never had, at a time when you thought there would be no more glimpses into their being. Would you not be trembling with joy?

   So maybe you think this is not quite as good. Or maybe you think it’s better. But the BBC says artificial intelligence technology will allow Paul McCartney to clean up a poor recording of an old John Lennon song and release it later this year. He’s calling it the final Beatles song.

   Sold! We’ll take it!

   My friend Linda, who lives on the coast in West Sussex southeast of London, confronted by my Beatles obsession and presumably speaking for her countrymen, said, “We’re over the Beatles.” Well some of us in the colonies are not.

   The Beatles are in our ears and in our eyes, even half a century after the breakup of the band. So I am setting aside for the moment, my mistrust of AI and the people who wield it, and waiting with eager anticipation for the new song.

   BBC music correspondent Mark Savage reported this story.

   “Sir Paul McCartney says he has employed artificial intelligence to help create what he calls the final Beatles record,” Savage wrote. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that the technology had been used to extricate John Lennon’s voice from an old demo so he could complete the song.”

   “We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” McCartney said.  

   “Sir Paul did not name the song, but it is likely to be a 1978 Lennon composition called “Now And Then.” It had already been considered as a possible reunion song for the Beatles in 1995, as they were compiling their career-spanning Anthology series.”

   “Sir Paul had received the demo a year earlier from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono. It was one of several songs on a cassette labelled ‘For Paul’ that Lennon had made shortly before his death in 1980.”

   “Lo-fi and embryonic, the tracks were largely recorded onto a boombox as the musician sat at a piano in his New York apartment,” Savage wrote. “Lennon wrote Now And Then during his retirement era, when he had no record contract and was busy raising his son, Sean.”

   “Cleaned up by producer Jeff Lynne, two of those songs – Free As A Bird and Real Love – were completed and released in 1995 and 96, marking the Beatles’ first ‘new’ material in 25 years.”

   “The band also attempted to record Now And Then, an apologetic love song that was fairly typical of Lennon’s later career, but the session was quickly abandoned,” Savage wrote.

   “It was one day – one afternoon, really – messing with it,” Lynne recalled. 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.”

   “Sir Paul later claimed George Harrison refused to work on the song, saying the sound quality of Lennon’s vocal was ‘rubbish.’

   “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,” McCartney told Q Magazine. “(But) George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”

   “There were also said to have been technical issues with the original recording, which featured a persistent buzz from the electricity circuits in Lennon’s apartment,” Savage wrote.

   “In 2009, a new version of the demo, without the background noise, was released on a bootleg CD. Fans have speculated that this recording may not have been available in 1995, suggesting it was stolen from his apartment, along with other personal effects, after his death.

   “In the intervening years, Sir Paul has repeatedly talked about his desire to finish the song.”

   “That one’s still lingering around,” McCartney told a BBC Four documentary on Jeff Lynne in 2012. “So I’m going to nick in with Jeff and do it. Finish it, one of these days.”

   “It would seem that technology has now afforded the musician a chance to achieve that goal. The turning point came with Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, where dialogue editor Emile de la Rey trained computers to recognize the Beatles’ voices and separate them from background noises, and even their own instruments, to create clean audio.

   “The same process allowed Sir Paul to duet with Lennon on his recent tour, and for new surround sound mixes of the Beatles’ Revolver album, created last year.”

   “He (Jackson) was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” Sir Paul told Radio 4’s Martha Kearney. “We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI.’”

   “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.