Before you say, “The Beatles don’t fit the genre All Punked Up covers”. If you’ve been listening to The All Punked Up Podcast (and if you haven’t, then I’m extremely disappointed in you), then you’ll know that John and I have been covering AI in music for the last few months. Back in February 2023, when AI was only in the beginning stages of entering the music industry, I even said something along the lines of, “Imagine AI having the ability to take a Beatles song and switch out Paul McCartney’s voice for John Lennon’s. It’d give us an opportunity to hear these songs in a different way.” Well, that’s not exactly happening here, but the main concept is as Paul says with the help of AI, he’s been able to finish a Beatles song using Lennon’s voice.
Paul McCartney disclosed that an unreleased Beatles track is set to be released this year, thanks to modern AI technology. Speaking with BBC Radio 4’s Today, McCartney revealed how he used artificial intelligence to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo in order to complete the untitled track.
McCartney received the demo for the new track from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, in 1994. The tracks were reportedly lo-fi and embryonic and mostly recorded on a boombox by Lennon on a piano in his New York apartment. The new version of the demo reportedly surfaced on a bootleg CD in 2009 minus the background noise.
Technical advances employed in the making of Peter Jackson’s Get Back Beatles documentary series, helped McCartney work on the unfinished song. McCartney said, “We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.”’
“We just finished it up, and it’ll be released this year,” McCartney told BBC.
Although officially untitled, McCartney revealed that the song that could be the new release was one of several on a cassette labeled “For Paul” that Lennon made shortly before his murder in 1980. During a one-day session in 1995, George Harrison refused to work on the song, saying the sound quality on Lennon’s vocals was “rubbish,” and the group duly abandoned the sessions.
No official release date has been announced as yet.
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