DON'T LAUGH

Ok, so I wrote a song.

Please don't laugh. Also, don't get too excited.

Lemme 'splain...

Steve was playing around with an AI music app, and he was putting in prompts for silly things. The program was doing a great job writing the songs he wanted, so far as an AI program can "do" a great job. It even wrote a song about our dogs that turned me into a snotty, crying mess because I loved it so much. It was fun, but I have complicated feelings about AI.

I think it can be a great help, and a useful tool, but I don't really think people should use it to create things out of whole cloth. I know too many musicians, writers, and artists to feel comfortable stealing from them, especially if that is how they make a living. I do use AI at work sometimes if I need a very specific graphic for something and can't find an alternative, but unless I'm in a hurry, I usually try and use those things as an inspiration or as parts for something I piece together myself. So, while I was enjoying the songs from the app and thought they were fun, they felt a little like a cheat.

He told me that you could put in prompts, or you could put in original lyrics, and the app would give you a song. Now he had my attention!

I can read music, and I can sing music, but I cannot write music. That is a whole set of skills that I do not possess, much to my chagrin. I've always wanted to write music but didn't know how to do it. Anytime I tried, I ended up playing a song that already existed. However, I can do words, and now I had a tool to help with the rest.

I've had this sentence running through my head for a few months that sounded like a line of a song, and it wouldn't leave me alone. I had tried to write something to make it into a song, but nothing worked. I was trying too hard to turn it into music rather than just putting down the words. So, in about 10 minutes, I came up with some lyrics and sent them to Steve and told him to use the prompt "Delta Blues" as the style of music and have a woman's voice sing it. I wasn't expecting very much.

Now, it's very imperfect and there are lyrics I would change if I could. They're a little derivative, and some lines are kind of cheesy, and I would much rather be the voice singing the song instead of the AI lady, but I like what the program did with it. It's more Chicago Blues than Delta Blues (the program emulated the style of Buddy Guy we think) but I'm not mad at it. I work with a musician who heard it and likes it enough that he said he'd learn to play it so I could actually perform it one day. I still know it's cheating, but I can't help enjoying the fact that I can hear a song I wrote "out loud." I uploaded it to SoundCloud so that I could have a way to listen to it easier and realized that I can share it. So I'm going to share it here.

It's ok if you don't like it, it's not great, but please don't laugh!

Here it is if you want to listen.