Lost Horizon

“Lost Horizon” is a track from the album “The Boys Of Dungeon Lane“, released in 2026.

According to Paul McCartney, the song was rediscovered by his longtime engineer Eddie Klein, who worked at Hog Hill Mill. While transferring and archiving old DAT (Digital Audio Tape) recordings, Klein came across a track titled “Lost Horizon,” which Paul had completely forgotten about. Far more than a simple demo, it was a fully developed song. Since DAT was commonly used between 1987 and 2005, the recording was likely made during that period. Klein died in 2005, meaning that, if Paul’s recollection is accurate, the song had remained in Paul’s mind for more than twenty years before its eventual release.

On March 30, 2026, a purported version of “Lost Horizon” appeared on YouTube. It was in fact an artificial intelligence-generated fake. Bill King of Beatlefan magazine contacted Steve Martin, Paul’s US press officer, who confirmed: “This is a fake.”

So there I was. Now I was working with Andrew, but I was working between Los Angeles, where he was, and East Sussex, where my home studio is. And me and Steve, my engineer, we were working on something and a great guy who had helped build the studio, a guy called Eddie Klein, who was a lovely guy and who actually came from here, used to work in Abbey Road.. And he’s a lovely man. He’s no longer with us, unfortunately, but he was such a great guy and he was actually working on some tapes at the back of the studio and we were working here doing something and we had a little break. He said, “Have you ever heard of a song called ‘Lost Horizon’?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Well, it’s on one of these cassettes.” He was changing cassettes over to DATs [digital audio tapes]. DATs have gone away. Anyway, I said, “No, I’ve never heard it.” He said, “Well, you should listen to it.”

So, we put it on and it was amazing because it was a complete song all in one take. And I think I must have just done it on holiday somewhere and forgotten it. So, anyway, luckily Eddie rediscovered it and he said, “I think we should do this song,” so we did. We took the demo, the cassette demo, and pretty much copied the whole thing. Didn’t really need to do much else. Then we took it to Andrew later and put a little guitar part on there. So, yeah, thanks to Eddie.

The other thing about Eddie is that he used to work here [at Abbey Road] and we’d be up there in the control room number two with The Beatles and we didn’t know how equipment worked, you know, if it was there, we’d use it and we screw around with it, do anything with it. And I think it was at the end of Magical Mystery Tour, the piano goes wonky. We had this device, I think it was called an oscillator, and it took things from, like, slow to medium to fast. You could alter the speed of whatever it was working on. So we used it and we were, you know, messing around and all the… All these sounds and stuff, you know, and Eddie said that. [cut] I remember it well. Thank you, Eddie, yeah. You know, I just think it might just have never been discovered, he might have just put it to DAT and that was that. So that was Eddie. And this is “Lost Horizon.”

Paul McCartney – From Exclusive Commentary Edition Digital Album – Recorded during the “Boys of Dungeon Lane” listening session at Abbey Road, May 5, 2026

Lost Horizon is an old song that you rediscovered. How did that happen?

That’s got a great origin story, because it came as a surprise. I had an engineer who built my studio, a great guy called Eddie Klein, who’d come from Abbey Road. Eddie was working in the studio one day. We were doing something else, and he was changing old tapes from the format they were in into a more modern format. He would work in the background as we were doing our stuff. And he said to me, “Do you ever remember this song called Lost Horizon?” I said, “No, not really.” He said, “Well, it’s not bad. It’s actually really good.” Well, come on, let’s hear it. The thing that surprised me was, number one, I’d forgotten it. I must have just done it on a holiday one afternoon, and put it down to a tape cassette. It would have been the early 2000s. I’d forgotten I’d done anything until Eddie rediscovered it. And the other thing that was good about it was that it was complete. Sometimes, if I sit down on holiday to write a song, I might just get a couple of verses. But this had the verses, the choruses, the bridges. The whole thing was there, so I thought, Wow, I’ve got to do that.

So we took the demo and kept the structure but re-recorded some of the things on it in exactly the same way as I had done on the demo. Andrew [Watt] said, “Wow, it’d be great if we had a hot little electric guitar going through it.” So I got this old ’56 Telecaster, a beautiful little instrument. I was imagining what Steve Cropper might do, so I was channeling him. We added that to it, not a lot else, All the songs have got these little origin stories, and that one’s about a relic found by good ol’ Eddie Klein. Thank God for Eddie!

Paul McCartney – From MOJO, May 14, 2026

After work had begun with Watt, McCartney said, he began looking at older tracks he’d laid down. He talked at length of “a great friend of mine,” Eddie Klein, who used to work at Abbey Road and had helped him build him home studio, and who died in 2020. Showing just how far back this goes, he said, “Eddie was transferring things from an old format to a more modern format, from tape cassette to DAT” (itself a long-bygone format). “He was doing this and doing that, and he was doing DAT,” McCartney punned, adding, “I was up all night thinking of that.” Klein asked him if he remembered doing “Lost Horizon,” which McCartney had long forgotten. (He did not put a date on the original inception of the song, but if possibly predated even the adaptation of DAT, which was around from the late ’80s through early 2000s, it must go back quite a ways indeed.)

Cut to the 2020s, and McCartney resurrected it on his own, “reproducing it exactly like the cassette, only just a more modern sound,” and then brought it to Watt for additional guitar work. “This is the track that came back from the past and nearly got lost, and good old Eddie found it. … Thank you, Eddie.”

From Variety, April 17, 2026 – From the “Boys of Dungeon Lane” listening session, April 16, 2026

The late Eddie Klein, who worked with the Beatles at Abbey Road and then with McCartney at his studio in Sussex, England, found the track that McCartney said he didn’t remember writing or recording. In England, “we produced it exactly like the cassette,” McCartney said, and then brought it to Los Angeles to add guitar parts. The chugging, mid-tempo track is a nostalgic look back, with lyrical reminders that “time makes every moment count” and “you gotta live for now.”

From Billboard, April 17, 2026 – From the “Boys of Dungeon Lane” listening session, April 16, 2026

Lyrics

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