Editor’s Note: Jere Hester is a journalist and author of “Raising a Beatle Baby.” He is director of editorial projects and partnerships at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. The opinions in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
Who’s the fifth Beatle?
The debate over who deserves the made-up title has raged for six decades among Fab Four fans, with top candidates ranging from the group’s producer, Sir George Martin, to their manager, Brian Epstein, to ill-fated early band member Stuart Sutcliffe.
But now there’s a 21st century contender for the honor: artificial intelligence.
Sir Paul McCartney’s revelation to BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program that AI-assisted tinkering with John Lennon’s vocals helped complete “the final Beatles record” bodes to ignite another fierce debate — one over technology threatening to shake up music as much as “I Want to Hold Your Hand” did all those years ago.
Some may be hearing prescient echoes of Lennon singing “nothing is real” in “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But to invoke another line from the classic song, there’s nothing to get hung about — in fact, McCartney’s announcement is cause for celebration.
The Beatles will give us one more recording to cherish while getting back where they once belonged: leading the latest music revolution, via their apparent swan song.
McCartney didn’t offer much detail, but gave no indication that AI created anything out of whole cloth. Film director Peter Jackson, who employed AI technology to restore reams of muddy footage for the epic 2021 documentary “The Beatles: Get Back,” managed this time to “extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” according to McCartney.
As the BBC notes, the “new” Beatles song set to be released later this year is probably “Now and Then.” The ballad was among the homemade Lennon demos Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow, gave to McCartney. But unlike “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” — songs the band was able to complete and put out in 1995 and 1996 — The Beatles quit working on “Now and Then” and never released it.
The band took some flak for releasing two songs years after Lennon’s murder in 1980. But they were simply following their longtime practice: Use the latest technology to push the bounds of creativity.
In their early days, the Beatles sometimes double-tracked vocals. Shortly before they quit touring in 1966, they turned the recording studio into a veritable mad scientists’ lab of music — running vocals (“Rain”) and guitar lines (“I’m Only Sleeping”) backward on their way to packing the landmark 1967 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album with trippy loops and other innovations that changed the course of popular music.
“Abbey Road,” the final album the Beatles recorded, featured some of the earliest uses of the Moog synthesizer in rock — including on “Here Comes the Sun,” which logged its one-billionth stream on Spotify last month.
The group’s embrace of technology and experimentation is a key ingredient in songs that sound as fresh to new ears as they did when released decades ago.
Still, seeing “AI” in a headline with “The Beatles” is jarring — especially amid concerns of the quickly evolving technology upending a lot more than music.
But in the right hands — in this case, Jackson and McCartney’s — AI can be a tool that wields magic.
McCartney is also smart to get ahead of the pack as the internet quickly fills with machine-made songs featuring the synthesized voices of the Beatles and other top artists. Some of the digital concoctions are disturbingly mechanical, while others are eerily intriguing. And the tech is only going to get better.
McCartney and Ringo Starr have proven careful stewards of the group’s work, supporting Jackson’s documentary and album remixes offering new peeks into The Beatles’ creative process.
Let’s hope the surviving Beatles, Ono and George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, make their wishes for preserving the band’s legacy clear to their younger loved ones. Let’s also hope they’ll leave leeway for future technological advances as unimaginable to us now as AI would have been to four working-class boys born in 1940s Liverpool.
In the meantime, those of us living in 2023 will soon be lucky enough to hear the Beatles come together for one last hurrah — with a little help from a friend named AI.