Ringo Starr
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Ringo Starr is brushing off “terrible rumors” that he and Paul McCartney used AI to recreate John Lennon‘s voice for their newly released Beatles song “Now and Then.”
The Beatles drummer addressed the issue in a new interview with AARP magazine about his life during and after his time in the iconic band and his reunion with McCartney to produce an unfinished track.
While Starr and McCartney, along with the late George Harrison, had teamed to release other demos featuring Lennon back in the 1990s, they had left “Now and Then” on the table after an issue with separating Lennon’s vocals from the instrumentals made it difficult to complete the track. That changed when the musicians worked with director Peter Jackson on the Disney+ documentary Get Back. During the process of producing that film, a new technology was developed based on machine learning, a branch of AI, that allowed the team to split the different components of the song into separate tracks.
McCartney, Starr and Giles Martin worked together to create new guitar and drum tracks, along with string arrangements, while the AI extracted Lennon’s vocals from a lower-quality cassette recording. “When we came to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI,” McCartney told BBC 4 Radio in June. “Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do. So it gives you some sort of leeway.”
Now, people have seemingly misunderstood how AI was utilized in the process of producing the track, to Starr’s frustration. After Starr recalled how last year, McCartney had called inquiring to work on “Now and Then” — “a great track of John singing and playing piano and George playing rhythm guitar” — and sent it to him, the drummer took on claims that they used a form of AI to generate Lennon’s voice.
“There were terrible rumors that it’s not John, it’s AI, whatever bullshit people said,” Starr told AARP. “Paul and I would not have done that. It’s a beautiful song and a nice way to finally close that door.”
During his Radio 4 interview, McCartney also expressed hesitation around the use of AI in music ahead of the release of the last Beatles song. “I’m not on the internet that much [but] people will say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s a track where John’s singing one of my songs’, and it’s just AI, you know?” the singer-songwriter said. “It’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads.
