‘Have you heard about the new Beatles record?” a friend texted me yesterday. I had. And despite my unparalleled enthusiasm for the group, I felt obliged to record without hesitation that I hate it already.
Per the Wall Street Journal, the “new” song “features AI-assisted vocals from the late Beatle John Lennon.” To achieve this, the film director Peter Jackson and his team digitized a demo tape that was recorded by Lennon in 1978, and then used artificial intelligence to extricate — and improve upon — the parts that the producers wanted to keep. From there, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr took over, adding the instruments and vocal harmonies that the original sketch lacked. Conceptually, the process was similar to what McCartney, Starr, and George Harrison did back in 1995, when they converted two forgotten Lennon demos into two fleshed-out songs (“Real Love” and “Free as a Bird”) and released them under the band’s name as part of the Anthology project. Apparently, “Let It Be” remains a suggestion.
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