If you haven’t heard, there is an insane amount of buzz about a band called The Velvet Sundown. This band isn’t just any regular ol group of 70s esque, Americana long haired California soul rockers…they are Ai generated, all the way down to their instruments and the images of them perfectly posed and glistening for their album cover. This band is gaining hundreds of thousands of listeners on Spotify (and other platforms) by the second. In fact, since I started writing this, they already hit over a million listeners on Spotify….I mean look, we are talking about it, so who ever “they” are, they are doing something right(or majorly wrong.)
So what do I think about it? Well of course, I am an artist and a songwriter and I, like so many other artists, have worked my way up in this business since I was a kid, playing in backyards, talent shows, small town restaurants, smokey bars, hotel lobbies, bowling alleys, beautiful velvety theaters, arenas, festivals, just about anywhere I could in the pursuit of chasing a musical dream. So when you see things like Ai bands coming in and encroaching on the human creative spirit, injected in the veins of a musical world via the prompts of some intelligent descriptions and an incredibly advanced ai models, it is well….SAD. I realize the world is evolving, and ai is here to stay, I just hope we can keep the tools in the tool box, something that can help the creatives create instead of confusing the listener. I know as a music fan and artist, I would want to know the difference between what was written through tears at 2 am on a heartbroken Tuesday night and what was prompted on a keyboard, generated and spit out, creepishly sounding humanlike and unfortunately, pretty believable at times.
Selfishly, as an artist and songwriter, the ego screams out saying “oh no, this means I will no longer have a job, I won’t get to do what I love, everyone is going to go listen to ai generated bands because no one is going to know what’s real anymore.” Some of this may be true, I think ai is going to change all of our “jobs” across the board in the coming years, BUT, we must believe and hope for our humanity that we can stay just that…HUMAN. I use ai in my life, it helps brilliantly as the most ultimate search engine or even helping a majorly unorganized person like myself to get my shit together. BUT, the idea of not picking up a guitar, pacing the kitchen floor for hours with an idea rolling around my head as it begging for its moment to be expressed and eventually shared to someone that really needs to hear it, well….I still want that for this world.
Even if Elon gets those Tesla bots looking so human like that they are up on stage, shredding on a telecaster while singing through their bionic jaws, I feel it won’t replace seeing someone sweating through their shirt on stage, fighting back the tears as they sing their heart out to a song that barely got them through one of the hardest moments of their life.
A year and a half ago I was deep in the woods on a hike when my mind started obsessing over the idea that people were starting to use Ai to write songs for them. It shook me of what’s to come. Suddenly the melody and lyrics of a tune-popped in my conscious from god knows where in the middle of that woods for a song I would soon call “Mr. Computer.” I started singing it(mostly in my head as I didn’t want to creep out all the other hikers). It went “I don’t want you to write me a song, Mr. Computer, I can do it all on my own, Mr. Computer, cause you aint felt her heartbeat or kissed her on a dark street, she’s never walked right out your door, left you crying on the floor, Mr. Computer.” I flew to New York and went to write the rest of the song with another fellow air breathing and crazy talented producer and human Alexis Kesselman. Here’s a little snippet of what we came up with. With a large does of irony I had Mr. Computer (AI) create his own image of a song written about him. It may never come out, but I think it very much sums up where I hope we can stay, humans evoking emotions, expressing ourselves in a way that keeps us grounded to the root of what truly matters. Mr. Computer can come along, he just has to sit in the passenger seat:)
