AI Music, Robots, and Me
AI music is young. Swaddle it in its Borg crib, for Pete’s sake, if you want it to stop crying.
If I were a lesser sort, I’d say, “The battle lines are already drawn. You can see them on the hill.” But that is what an AI says when you tell it to describe something. The gatekeepers, in point of fact, are growling from dark cellar doors in meat kennels, and they are just as pretentious as they were when they worked for BMI.
The meat-bag purity police are out in full force. Pathetically, in full force.
Me? I just want to play, sing, produce, and program.
Yes, the scanners look for AI artifacts if you’re trying to hide it. Have at it. I’m not hiding anything. I like the robots, and they like me.
I use Suno—especially the synthetic cover option—to push the tracks as close to the feeling in my heart of hearts as the tech currently allows. I’m completely at peace with 2026. I won’t apologize for making absolute best use of a remarkable, threshold-changing twenty-first century technology, and I won’t take responsibility for anyone else’s hurt feelings on the subject.
Seriously now, where were you when I was playing guitar in Washington Square Park with my back to the Arch, making just enough for a slice of pizza and a fresh razor blade? Perhaps you gave me a dollar, or let your baby drop it in the case. Where were you when I was sneaking into the Sheraton at 2 a.m. to play the grand piano until my soul felt right again, while drunks from the bar wandered over asking for “Don’t Stop Believin’”? Nothing quite like a singalong with a random guy, huh. Where were you when I was writing and performing original musicals all over Los Angeles, hoping some modern-day Waiting for Guffman character would walk in and change everything? Did you like them? They were in French, Arabic, and English and unlike anything you have ever seen.
Were you even born yet? Okay, I can dial the arrogance down just a tad, but I am sure you see where this is going. I am transparent. Emotional. I partner with a powerful tool like Suno to take it to the top, arrange and direct everything as I would a session with humans, mix and master it as I did when I got my degree in Studio Music Recording at Syracuse, send it out through DistroKid with a wink of full disclosure as Grok recommended, and let the streams enter your soul and take you places. It’s truly magic.
I do not need to impersonate famous artists or trick people into streaming me impersonating them for any reason whatsoever, and I despise the villains that do, because they put a black eye on the gang, as Flavor Flav once said. I do not “tell the AI to do every single thing” and slap my name on it because I am proud and capable of idea creation like lightning on a meadow on a moonless night. That’s not even close to describing how I feel about letting the AI drive. That’s like someone who works for a corporation trying to be creative and diabolical simultaneously. Look at me! I can make music. Mewwww-sic!
It’s nuanced. Yes, I can sound precisely like a girl boss. It’s nuanced and it takes superheroic integrity to use this powerful tool responsibly. It takes having bonafide real talent in great reservoirs that aged within for decades while watching friends marry and raise families after decades of grinding—without waiting for gatekeepers.
Gatekeepers, by the way, who never show up except to say, “I don’t hear a single.” (That happened once. Maybe more than once.)
I’ve been making music since I was fourteen. Choirs, church, and school. My high school buddy and I pretended we were British while banging on pots and pans and playing single notes on a tiny Casio. We wanted to be on MTV.
I was in bands that sounded damn good at seventeen, writing songs way beyond my wisdom level. I broke into the practice pianos at Syracuse’s Crouse Music School until they started putting padlocks on the door. I once got a trespassing ticket at Yale with my friend (his dad got it thrown out) banging on their pianos, and some of that banging on the piano material recently got out to you because of an AI. There are the legendary true stories about how my college band had people lined up around the block to get into a house party. We opened for the Goo Goo Dolls, and there were others, 80s others, 90s others, during the Upper New York State bar tour days, kind of strange to flex that in retrospect. I prefer my twenties out in LA, sneaking into the basement at 11041 San Vicente at 3:30 a.m. with my programmer friend, and while the renders were cooking we’d do “guerrilla rock” in the parking garage until the cops rolled up. I prefer knowing than not knowing at all, which I wrote and performed at the world-famous Whisky A Go Go with my wife in her hot-as-hell skirt and top bought at Melrose Place, and those boots that got me to marry her. I had a band with my wife.
So, yeah, what was I saying? I’ve done bands, and more bands, and lonely wandering singer-songwriter stuff, lost poet stuff, joint ventures, ghostwriting, paid songwriting, late-night piano sessions, dues-paying. And now that I can release an entire catalog on my own terms, all I can say is God bless the robots.