Ringo Starr on Beatles AI song: “For all the madness going on around it, it’s a beautiful track”
The drummer has assured fans that the new song sounds “beautiful”, despite the concerns over the use of artificial intelligence.
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Ringo Starr has shared his thoughts about the upcoming Beatles track, on which John Lennon’s old vocal recordings were extracted and refined using AI.
In an interview with Variety, the drummer assures fans that the new song, which is suspected to be the unreleased 1978 track Now and Then, sounds “beautiful”, despite the concerns over the use of artificial intelligence.
“It’s not down to AI,” he says. “It’s not like we’re pretending anything. That is actually John’s voice, Paul’s voice and bass playing, George [Harrison] on rhythm guitar and me on drums.
“The two things that are new are Paul’s bass and me on drums… I really worked at it just months ago here. And it works,” he added. “It’s a beautiful song. You know, for all the madness going on around it, it’s still a beautiful track. And our last track.”
News of this hotly awaited song first came to light in an interview with Paul McCartney on BBC Radio 4, where McCartney said that AI had been used to take John Lennon’s voice from old audio and strip it from its instrumental background.
As well as excited reactions from fans, there was also a great deal of “confusion and speculation” about the record. The bassist then made a statement saying that despite the use of AI, the song had not been “artificially created.”
“[It’s] been great to see such an exciting response to our forthcoming Beatles project. No one is more excited than us to be sharing something with you later in the year,” wrote McCartney on Instagram Stories.
“We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it,” he continued. “Seems to be a lot of guess work out there. Can’t say too much at this stage but to be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings – a process which has gone on for years”
“We hope you love it as much as we do. More news in due course.”
