Songs

Before you start digging in here, I’m a lyricist. I haven’t come to dethrone Taylor Swift. I write songs cinematically and give them a simple life on an acoustic. It was good enough for Dylan and Cohen and it’s good enough for me.

But there’s also an alternate universe in which I can see how my songs would be if somebody gave me a stack of money and left me to do my own thing. So I Frankensteined them to life with the help of AI - not to fool anybody but because they sound great and it’s better that they exist like this as well than not exist at all.

Life is too short to overthink these things.

Sunday 12 October:

With a few hours to kill and not get myself into trouble, I thought it would be a neat idea to slap on my alter-ego of Johnny Beatnik and ask my friendly AI pal to help me make a funk album out of a bunch of lyrics I’d used before… a few hours is not a lot of time to write an album’s worth of new words and I was only looking to pass some time.

I didn’t think it would actually turn out to be great. The software is barreling on at a rate of knots out there. I swear if I heard some of these on the radio, I wouldn’t blink an eye - but I might wonder who it was. I know it’s tacky to love your own stuff, but this is a great EP. An album was too much of an ask once I got into it and spent far too much time editing each song making it better and better with each pass.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the supernatural grooves of Funk Like A Beast. Dig it.

I flirted with creating some AI music across the summer of 2024. I’ve since moved back to my trusty acoustic, but the results stand. To hear my songs played back with decent production was good for my soul. You can find this ‘greatest hits’ type compilation of 30 odd songs called Dig Out Your Own Pirate Grave on Apple Music, Spotify and wherever else you might get your audio kicks.

There’s a lyric book that goes with it in the store too.

There’s an acoustic version coming too but it’s not finished yet… stay tuned.

May 2022:

With my magazine life hanging up in the wardrobe, maybe permanently, I figured I’d best get busy, so I wrote some new songs... a lot of songs. These Paper Tigers demo sessions were all I could get recorded in eight hours and that’s OK because Mutt Lange and Max Martin were not coming to save me.

I called them supernatural murder ballads but maybe they’re just stories that needed telling… and then I went out and told some stories.

Back in 1994, I recorded a fistful of songs with a new band name: SpiritWalker.

I always thought they deserved better than the production we got on an ancient Fostex 4 Track that I could barely work. I am not technically smart enough to clean up the originals, but I had enough gas in the tank to get an A.I. to rework it in as close to how I originally intended it.

Here’s a re-released EP that’s free to download if you wish. You can take your pick between the original human version from 30 years ago and the ghost tech remixes, but if we look at it as an experiment on how A.I. in music might be able to help you along, I think this is a pretty good indication.