"It was a John Lennon demo we were working on and we just finished it," Paul McCartney said in an interview on BBC Radio 1978. The song should appear later this year. He did not reveal the name of the thing, but journalists assume that it is the song "Now And Then" (here and there - or: from time to time). It was written by John Lennon in XNUMX.
The most famous band of all time - The Beatles - broke up in 1970. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr went their separate ways. They never got together like the Beatles again. John Lennon was killed in New York in 1980. He was only 40 years old. George Harrison died in 2001 of lung cancer. Ringo Starr, who is 82, and Paul McCartney, who is 80, are still touring the world and performing.
In 1994, Paul McCartney received a cassette with the inscription "For Paul" from Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono. It contained several songs that Lennon had recorded on an ordinary tape recorder a year before his death. They consisted of piano accompaniment and singing.
Producer Jeff Lynne managed to clean the tracks "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love" from noise, but he judged that the song "Now And Then" was too burdened with background noise, so he did not include it in the big serial compilation of unreleased Beatles songs that was published in 1995 and 1996 under the name "Anthology". In addition, George Harrison did not like the song, because it seemed to him that the structure was not finished. That's why they didn't work on the song anymore.
"The Last Beatles Song"
Peter Jackson's successful 2021 documentary series The Beatles: Get Back revealed the possibilities of artificial intelligence to McCartney. For the purposes of the film, Lennon's voice was separated from the instruments.
"You tell the machine - it's a voice, and it's a piano. Put the guitar down," McCartney explained to the BBC. Now McCartney and his team have applied that technology – presumably to the song "Now And Then."
"So we created something that would be the last Beatles song. With artificial intelligence, we can clean up John's voice from the demo. Then we mixed it as usual. Artificial intelligence has given us more room to maneuver."
Artificial intelligence – a blessing or a curse
McCartney sang a duet with a virtual John Lennon at the 2022 Glastonbury festival with the help of artificial intelligence. However, last month the singer Sting warned that we need to "defend human achievements against artificial intelligence" and that this will be the main struggle of musicians in the coming decades. The debate about this in the music industry is very heated. Some highlight the potential, while others highlight the dangers.
The digital music service Deezer has announced a tool that will recognize and label voices cloned by artificial intelligence, thus protecting the copyrights of the original artists. Namely, with the help of artificial intelligence, it is already possible to produce voices that are very similar to the voices of the original performers.
McCartney still wants to take advantage of the new technology. He said it was a bit scary, but also exciting, because that's where the future is according to him. "We have to see where it takes us," he said.
"In the Eye of the Storm"
After the breakup of the Beatles, McCartney was very active not only as a musician, but also as a painter, photographer, animal rights activist. An exhibition of his photographs from 1963 and 1964 will open in London at the end of June under the name "Eyes of the Storm". It will show 250 photos that have not been shown to the public until now. McCartney then photographed scenes of the coming Beatlemania.
Before the exhibition, a monograph will be printed with photographs that bear witness to McCartney's very personal observation of the famous and crazy era in which the band was constantly surrounded by hysterical fans. "Millions of eyes were suddenly upon us and created an image I will never forget," McCartney writes in the foreword. The feeling was like being in the "eye of the storm". That's how McCartney's book was called.
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