“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 cyncial 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 – specically, bands like Led Zeppelin and early Heart that are considered “classic rock” now. The 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 on 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 in my lyric sheets, I could get Suno to create in minutes 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 wasmy heartfelt repsonse to a speech I saw by then President Jimmy Carter. I had 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 this song. But after a few 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 a total of 15 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 week of work, I had the 15 songs where I wanted them to be, and I deleted my Suno account. 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.
So, I called this set “Those Voices In My Head”, which I think is the right title. The album cover has the current me gazing into a mirror to see all the characters I created to deliver these 15 songs – the ragged outlaw, the hard rock god, the sassy southern queen, and the ethereal Celtic sorceress. I want to thank the Suno app for allowing me to realize the dream of finishing these songs. But please, don’t let me reactivate my account…
Distribution to the streaming services is planned, after I research the copyright issues further. In the meantime, you can access the audio below. I hope you enjoy listening to these as much as I enjoyed creating them and finally bringing them to life they deserve.