Those Voices in My Head

“Those Voices in My Head” is an outlier for my musical catalog. After writing and recording almost 150 songs, I felt I had accomplished everything I wanted to do with music. In particular, the last two Mannish Boy albums seemed to summarize nicely who I was and what I wanted to say in my 60s. I was also beginning to get a little cynical about all the music being created with these new generative AI tools. It made it too easy for too many people to make too much mediocre music. And there were of course all sorts of unresolved copyright and chain of ownership issues.

But there was something that gnawed at me. In all these years of sitting at my laptop and creating music, there were a number of songs I never “got right”. Most of these were songs I wrote when I was younger and I based them on the types of music I listened to at the time – especially bands like Led Zeppelin and Heart that are considered “classic rock” now. Those songs as I heard them in my head had Golden Rock Gods like Robert Plant and Ann Wilson belting them out with earth shaking vocals I could never emulate. So, the songs always felt incomplete to me – tinny and one dimensional.

So, I decided to give the latest generation of AI tools a chance to rescue this island of misfit songs, primarily an app called Suno. And, as a guy who spent his life playing with the latest tech, both as a professional and as an enthuiast, I was blown away by the results. With the right style prompts and the right section titles and modifiers in my lyric sheets, I could get Suno to create in minutes and hours what had taken me weeks and months to accomplish before. And more amazingly, they sounded so much like the songs I heard in my head. I started with “I Went to See the President”, which was the first song I wrote when I was 15 and was my heartfelt response to a speech I saw by then President Jimmy Carter. I’ve arranged and recorded 3 different versions of that song over the years, and none of them captured the emotion I felt when I first wrote it. But after an hour and many iterations with this tool, I landed on the version I always wanted to record – and it was just so damn good…finally.

…And it just went on from there, until I had over 60 of those songs reimagined using Suno. I felt a combination of shame and joy in this process. The shame came from using a tool I had so many misgivings about. But the joy came from the quality of results. After a month of solid work, I had the songs where I wanted them to be, and put the brakes on any further Suno reimagining. I needed to drop the mic on this experience, or else I would crawl down a rabbit hole and redo all 150 songs. And that would not be right, because so many of them are the best I could do at the time, and my limited vocals work for those songs. I wrote them, and I should represent them to the world – end of story.

I call the project “Those Voices in My Head”, and because it has so many songs, I divided it into five volumes, each representing a different side of my personality. The titles of the volumes are intentionally very archaic terms describing the theme that unites each volume. You can click here to see a quick promo video for the project that describes this in more detail.

…These songs span almost 50 years. The earliest ones were written when I was a teenager back in my bedroom with my used steel string guitar and my notebook. I had no recording equipment, so my notebooks were the only way I was able to reconstruct these songs when I discovered them. Fortunately, I was an avid diarist, and wrote many detailed notes about what I wanted these songs to sound like. Finally, with the help of Suno, I am able to create versions of these songs that match what I aspired to so many years ago. These songs for the most part are serious, wordy, earnest, and very emotional – at least to me they are.

I also took this opportunity to take some of the very florid love poetry and songs I wrote that I never had the courage to share with the public before…and create versions of them I am willing to share with the public now. Because, well, that’s who I was – and that’s who I am. These songs include “You, and Only You”, “The Farewell”, “The Enchanted Sunrise”, and “Pinioned By Laws I Don’t Understand”. I could never credibly sing these, but the voices I found through Suno were able to pull them off. Get a bottle of wine, light a candle or two, and get your hankies out for these…

The other songs vary widely in style and tone, and some are things I wrote in the last year or two. In many cases, I felt I could improve upon my original arrangement and recording, and I could do this by creating different characters to sing and present them. The album cover has the current me gazing into a mirror to see all the characters I created to deliver these songs – the ragged Country Outlaw, the bellowing Hard Rock God, the playful and funky Soul Man, the sassy Tex-Mex Queen, and the wise and ethereal Celtic Goddess. They represent some of the many “voices in my head” that led to the creation of these songs. I think of what Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself”, something I read religiously when I was young:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I want to thank the Suno app for allowing me to realize the dream of finishing these songs. But please, don’t let me keep going…

Distribution to the streaming services is planned, after I research the copyright issues further. In the meantime, you can access the songs at the links below. I hope you enjoy listening to these as much as I enjoyed creating them and finally bringing them to a life they deserve.

Because there are so many songs, I suggest listening to one volume at a time. If you are a glutton for punishment, the link to access all the songs is at click here.