Paul McCartney Says AI-Assisted ‘Last Beatles Record’ on the Way

A final Beatles record has been completed with the help of artificial intelligence, according to Paul McCartney. The as-yet-unnamed track was built from a John Lennon demo tape. "We just finished it up, it will be released this year," McCartney told BBC Radio 4's Today during an interview to promote his new photo book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm.

"When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on," he explained. "We were able to take John's voice and get it pure through this AI so that then we could mix the record as you would normally do — it gives you some sort of leeway. So there's a good side to it and then a scary side and we'll just have to see where that leads."

McCartney credited director Peter Jackson, who worked on the band's 2021 documentary Get Back, with showing him how AI could be used in the studio. "He was able to extricate John's voice from a ropey little bit of cassette — it had John's voice and a piano," he said. "He could separate them with AI, they could tell the machine, 'That's a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar,' and he did that. So it has great uses."

In 1994 McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison reunited to work on two other incomplete Lennon demos, "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love." The songs were released under the Beatles' name in 1995 and 1996 on the Anthology 1 and Anthology 2 compilations.