Paul McCartney clarifies comment about using A.I. to replicate John Lennon’s voice
McCartney explains that they just cleaned up old audio with a computer, which is totally normal
Aux News John Lennon
Last week, Paul McCartney made everyone in the world a little anxious by revealing that he was getting ready to release a brand new Beatles song featuring an A.I.-assisted version of John Lennon’s voice—a presumed necessity for any “new” Beatles track, since Lennon has been dead for a long time now.
While that was the buzzy headline version of the story, the truth—which we noted at the time in our write-up—was that McCartney wasn’t actually creating new Lennon vocals with some kind of A.I. algorithm. In reality, he was using the technology that Peter Jackson utilized to restore old Beatles rehearsal footage for his Get Back documentary to isolate and clean up existing Lennon vocals off of an unreleased demo recording.
Still, he said “A.I.,” and people (justifiably) don’t like the idea of some computer replacing anyone (whether it’s TV intro sequence animators or a beloved musical artist), and so the whole thing still seemed to leave Beatles fans a little uneasy. So, today, McCartney posted a clarification on Twitter, explaining that “nothing has been artificially or synthetically created,” adding, “It’s all real and we all play on it.” He noted that they “cleaned up some existing recordings” and that’s all, which is something that “has gone on for years.”
The problem with all of this is simply that McCartney casually mentioned that they were telling an A.I. to separate Lennon’s voice from the guitar sounds or whatever, which is probably totally accurate, but what he should’ve just said was that “a computer” had done it. If you say “we made a new Beatles song using old recordings and a computer,” you sound like a cool-ass hacker splitting code in the Matrix. If you say “we made a new Beatles song using A.I.,” you sound like you’re personally tearing up the “Imagine” memorial in Central Park and putting in a Tesla charging station.
21 Comments
There was no problem, it was obvious what he was talking about and any Beatles fan who care about this knows about the third demo. Clickbait merchants from shithole sites sure liked to spin it, though.
Hmmm.
I know nothing about AI. I’ll ask my mother. She should know.
When she’s on her Commodore 64.
Are you sure? She was born a long, long time ago…
yeah, I know…in a galaxy far far away.
You could ask my sister Pam, but she’s always at work.
I caught her in drag, in her polythene bag. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He made that pretty clear the first time. People don’t read. Or think.
People have no clue what AI is beyond their smart phone app.
Take an 81-year-old man who didn’t attend university and who consumed a fair amount of drugs and ask him to put “technology” and “dead star” in the same general vicinity.
Write a shrill headline. Get clicks.
John Lennon can’t be replaced with AI.
But the AV Club sure as fuck can.
I was happy about the “we all played on it” piece of the clarification. Since Paul was calling it a “new Beatles song,” I was wondering what, if any, role George Harrison had. Maybe there’s a guitar track from the 90’s when they were working on the other two demo songs?
I inferred or recollected – obviously possibly incorrectly – that the Moondogs* worked on this track during ANTHOLOGY but put it aside because Lennon’s vocal track couldn’t be separated well enough from the guitar/piano in the source tape at that time. So presumably there are George guitar bits available from those sessions.
* – the lads were “Johnny and The Moondogs” pre-Beatles – I think they missed out by not rebranding their 90s work thusly. But no one asked me. . .
All of this is correct.
Harrison notoriously hated the Now and Then demo, and the two others then decided to stop working on the song.You have to keep in mind that Free as a Bird, Real Love and Now and Then was stuff that Lennon didn’t consider for inclusion on Double Fantasy and even on the planned up follow-up album (the material by Lennon on Milk and Honey consisted of rough takes and studio demos recorded during the Double Fantasy sessions). They were sketches that need a lot of polishing. And they had been recorded on a cheap tape recorder in mono. There are other versions of Real Love that are much more interesting than the one they ended up using as the base track. The guitar version, released on the soundtrack for the John Lennon Imagine documentary is actually quite good, except that Lennon hadn’t finished the lyrics at that point. So, they used instead a more complete piano demo, where Lennon’s timing was quite fluctuating (and the piano was particularly poorly recorded).The circulating version of Now and Then is fine, for the first 40 seconds, until Lennon segues into a second segment, which is fine, but isn’t properly related to the first one. And then comes the third segment, which is also fine… It’s not awful, but it requires some deep reshaping (not just adding a bridge like on Free as a Bird) to make it work.As George Harrison had mostly accepted to be part of Anthology for the money (some ill-advised investments in moviemaking, like a Sean Penn-Madonna old timey vehicle, had got him bankrupt), he was also the one who didn’t see the point of putting together a third song based on these demos. And he was right.The real question about this new try on Now and Then shouldn’t be whether George or Ringo play on it. Harrison wasn’t convinced by the version he had heard and it would be in poor taste to include some preliminary work he might have tried for a few minutes. And Ringo doesn’t even play the main drums on his recent recordings (you can see that Jim Keltner is always listed next to him in the credits). The real question is whether Paul was able to rewrite and complete the song, keeping most of the Lennon segments (minus the piano, hopefully) intact and bringing some real progression. That’s where our hopes for a good song should go.
So this is a non-story. Cool.
For people who actually know what AI is and what it isn’t, Paul’s statement was perfectly acceptable.
If you say “we made a new Beatles song using old recordings and a computer,” you sound like a cool-ass hacker splitting code in the Matrix. If you say “we made a new Beatles song using A.I.,” you sound like you’re personally tearing up the “Imagine” memorial in Central Park and putting in a Tesla charging station.
I hate the accuracy of this. 😑“Artificial intelligence” and “A.I.” have become such loaded—downright triggering—terms, that game developers are going to have come up with something else to call the code which governs enemy behavior, lest they say something about their game’s use of A.I. and immediately become the day’s main character on Twitter. (And find out what the Bad Ending looks like.) 😬
Would you ask Tom Petty to clarify this statement on AI?!
Why do a bunch of losers on the internet feel qualified to tell Paul McCartney whether or not he can use his bandmate’s recordings to make music?
The problem with all of this is simply that McCartney casually mentioned that they were telling an A.I. to separate Lennon’s voice from the guitar sounds or whatever, which is probably totally accurate, but what he should’ve just said was that “a computer” had done it.Sam, what do you think an A.I. is?
He doesn’t.