What started out as a flirt with composing with AI, turned into one of the silliest and fantastic albums I ever made.
So this was a wild little adventure. It started with a trip to Stockholm in the winter of 2023 to meet one of my best friends, Therma, to visit and see the sights of one of the cosmopolitan capitals of the world.
The fact of the matter was, I hadn’t had a decent holiday in years and really wanted to experience what Sweden had to offer. So I jumped on a plane and managed to win the upgrade bidding war with SAS (that no one ever seems to enter!) with the minimum lowest bid (twice actually!)
So after finding out that a drug dealer had recently exploded and a less than cooperative MacDonalds; Therma introduced me to Suno. For the uninitiated, this a song writing AI that can make a track from some prompts in practically any style you like.
We spent at least two evenings getting drunk on red wine and making tracks about our adventures in Stockholm, as well as the most ridiculous tracks I could think of, with the most questionable lyrics. I quickly learned you could structure songs quite quickly after reading the documentation. The 1st proper track was born, “Reggae Insurance”, written in Jamaican Pigeon and truly the daftest thing I made in that brief foray.
After I got back home, I quickly got a subscription myself and started building tracks. It was quite an early version of Suno, so you could only do 2 mins at a time. Then a learned you could stitch the bits together and make full tracks. So I began composing by error.
I released a small offering of the 1st tracks and it almost got me booked on 3 festivals. I was getting musicians together to bring it up to standard, however the fleeting interest had passed and I was unwilling to release an unrehearsed performance. Nice to be asked though.
After a few more small forays into falling in and out of love with Suno, the algorithm vastly improved and started letting you submit stems and parts for the tracks. This is when I got to work with all of the tracks and re-mastered and composed them.
Yes, it’s true I cannot sing like Aretha Franklin and although my vocal performance of “A 1980’s thresh and metal singer” and “1980’s 1990 American stadium rock singer” (All non-branded to avoid the censors) was somewhat uniquely hilarious, the results were undeniable.
In combination with stems sang, played, whistled, rigagooed, Frankenstein-ed solos, keyboard solos, etc etc; AI really took what I had and placed to polish on it.
It was like having a session musician and producer that had an infinite amount of patience, with the ability to produce a commercial sounding rock album. Also Gypsy Jazz, Ratpack, Yacht Rock… it seriously is a wonderful tool.
Out of it came this handsome, uncanny, glorious; monster. Stitched together by me taking the complete and utter piss out of each genre, and twisting it into the only thing it could produce: a commercially viable sounding haemangioma of everything popular, combined with my innate inability to take it seriously.
I love this album. It is a machine doing everything it can to make me sound like a commercial entity. It did a great job.
In order to truly master something, I feel that your involvement has to be undeniable, no matter how it changes. I have learned how to work with AI and it was a lot of fun.