The Message and the Messenger: the New Reality of Identity and AI

Future shock is a very real phenomenon, and everyone is currently experiencing it, if they're not busy starving to death or otherwise distracted.

It only begins to truly occur to me in the past few months that for the whole of human history up until very recently, there were a whole lot of challenges involved with being someone else.

An author could write a book under a different name, but if they were using initials and trying to be gender-neutral, or if they had a name that people might identify with a particular nationality or skin color, whatever actual gender they were or whatever they actually looked like in the flesh was all very likely to become very apparent to everyone if they ever went out and gave a talk or an interview.  You could present yourself as whoever you wanted to in writing, but only in writing.  If you were to be heard or seen it was much different.

Of course such challenges have not stopped people who are compelled for any number of different reasons to present as someone very different from the person they might have grown up being.  I know many people who have long been drawn to presenting as a different gender, who are compelled to go to great lengths of all sorts to convincingly present as another gender, and identify as such.

I have known many people who have sought to present themselves as being from a certain nation, region or social class other than the one they are from, who have again gone to great lengths to dress differently, act differently, learn a whole new set of social mores and ways of being, change their accents, learn new languages, and then master a particular regional dialect of that language.

Still, even after decades of living as another gender, only a tiny minority of the most convincing trans people can really pass as the gender they identify with, if they grew up with another gender.  If I'm talking to someone it usually takes a few seconds at most to notice that they did not grow up with the gender they now identify as.

Even after decades of living in New York City, my nanny, as Lola called herself, could never entirely lose her vaguely German accent.  She never admitted to being German, or Jewish, and always claimed she was from London, England, where she had been sent as a teenager while her parents back home in Germany were left to die.  Presumably terrified of being identified as a German or a Jew for most of her life, or for whatever other reason not wanting to be known as such, Lola still never managed to master either the English or the New York accent.  Up until the time she was near death, everyone wondered where she was really from, and then on her deathbed the German came out.

It's hard to be someone else, no matter how much you want to be.  It takes a lot of work, and then after all that effort you only may have managed to convincingly change one little aspect of your identity, with the others all remaining the same.  For example, maybe you change your gender, but you're still an English-speaking white person from somewhere in the midwest, or wherever.

In the entertainment industries it's all a bit different, as far as messages and messengers go.  In music and film, for the most part, some people are writing the songs and the scripts, and other people are doing the acting.

But historically it was a tiny fraction of society that ever got to have the experience of being a professional songwriter, writing songs for someone else to record for a record label.  It was a small fraction of society who ever had the chance to write a screenplay that might come to life in a cinema with actors speaking your words as if they were their own.

In the past few months it has come to the attention of millions and millions of people around the world that everything has now changed.

As with the physical world, it's still possible to spot a "fake" online, but the vast majority of time people don't.  For example, according to something I read recently, 34% of the music on the streaming platform, Deezer, has somehow or other been determined to be AI-generated, but 97% of listeners can't tell the difference.  (The remaining 3% are largely professionals in the entertainment industries, I'm guessing.)

As a songwriter myself, I long ago observed that you can write a song from a perspective other than your own, and do so very convincingly, and movingly.  With many of the songs people think of as iconic in various ways, people are often surprised when they learn that Aretha Franklin's hit, "Respect," was not written by a woman.  Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" was not written by a Black person.

I am a person of a certain background, and for keen observers certain things are immediately obvious, upon hearing my voice for a little while.  I'm male, from somewhere in the northern parts of the US, and probably white.  If I'm to be seen as well as heard, my whiteness can be easily confirmed at that point.  Other things can be inferred, but these three characteristics of gender, nationality and race are big ones.

Even being from this background, though, I began to understand long ago as a performer myself that despite being who I am, I can sing from a perspective very different from my own -- say, from the vantage point of a Palestinian refugee -- and, judging from the tears flowing down the faces of my Palestinian audience members on so many occasions, I can still hit the nail on the head.

Similarly, my background is one very oriented towards different forms of acoustic music.  I developed an appreciation for punk rock and hip-hop after I was well into adulthood, and I think this comes across to aficionados of punk or hip-hop in various ways.  People who are into these forms of music, however, tend to still manage to identify with what I'm doing, if we connect with each other.  I play in a lot of punk venues as a result.

The limitations are still there, however.  The message is being delivered by the messenger.  When one of my songs develops a life of its own and starts getting sung by other people who may not know who wrote it, this is always very exciting -- the art being appreciated truly for the art's sake, perhaps having nothing to do with the original messenger.  But generally, that's not what happens, and the songs are being delivered by me.

For live performance we still of course have all sorts of these limitations.  But as songwriters, anyway, the ceiling has suddenly been lifted.  No longer do you need to be one of those people who can afford to hire a band, a recording studio, engineer and producer, and get them to convincingly record your songs, if you want to hear someone other than yourself do them.

It's been months now and I'm still dizzy from the experience.  It's an ongoing, daily dose of future shock.  

It is crazy to be able to work as a lyricist with a brilliant bunch of AI multi-instrumentalists, despite their often strange ways of interpreting my prompts, because we always eventually end up with amazing results.  It is crazy to be able to tell them to play the song in whatever musical styles I want to explore, and with some editing, for the songs to work that way so well.  I no longer need to be an acoustic guitarist with an obvious punk influence, or a lyricist from a folkie singer/songwriter background who has a penchant for hip-hop.  I can now form a folk-punk hip-hop band, no problem.

What blows my mind the most, however, is the whole gender thing.  Ever since I started writing songs with my AI band, I have not once felt compelled to write a song for a male voice.

I can choose the vocalist's gender, and I can give the band lots of other instructions, general and very specific.  As with a human band, what they'll do with my instructions is hard to predict, but that's why we keep working on it until we get it the way I want it, again just like with a human band in a studio, aside from everything happening a hundred times faster -- and aside from sitting alone with my laptop, rather than having fun hanging out with other human musicians in a studio.

There is a subtlety to presenting a song as a woman singing, with a female voice, that in many ways is hard to explain.  It's both as powerful and as subtle as choosing instrumentation, or stylistic musical choices for the band, and how it's interpreting the song, and relating to the content of the lyrics.

Most of the past several dozen songs I've written as Ai Tsuno (the name of my AI band, or the singer of the band, or both) have been very much in keeping with most of the songs I have written as David Rovics -- they have been about the war on Palestine, Trump's imperialism, labor struggles, and other current events.  Even so, being able to sing about these things with a woman's voice is, along with the amazing production values and extreme stylistic variation available to work with, what makes the AI band phenomenon that now exists such an intoxicating one, for me.

When I was just starting out with this altogether new experience, for the first several dozen songs I wrote obsessively about three subjects.  One was the idea of being someone or something else, a reality which working with AI was constantly confronting me with.  Another was AI itself.  The third, and most dominant in the beginning, was sex.

I have written a lot of erotic fiction under a pen name, mostly really written for a very select group of intimate friends who share the same kink as me, but also published in appropriate forums so other like-minded kinksters might enjoy it.

Initially I thought as Ai Tsuno I might be doing the same sort of thing, but with songs.  As I wrote these kinky, DS-themed lyrics, though, it became more and more obvious how completely normative it is in popular music circles for more than a century now for a man to be writing songs about sex from the perspective of an enthusiastic Sub that are intended for a woman to sing.  Normally we just call that pop music.  

Ai Tsuno's more sexy material does have a very enthusiastic audience among my small kink circles, but I deigned to publish the songs along with the rest of them because, for the most part, these songs are no more riske than anything Madonna or Lady Gaga sings, and no more cultish than your average gospel song.  So I eventually figured, what the heck, I'll just advise people that if they don't want to hear songs about sex, don't listen to pop music, generally, or to Ai Tsuno's first three albums.

There's my report for today from the AI music-generation rabbit hole I've largely been living in now for months.  More news when I dig a little deeper here...

The Sledgehammer Effect

Do you remember where you were when you first realized that AI-generated music had passed the Turing Test with flying colors?

The past couple months in my life have been pretty full-on.  Kamala and I had a very busy tour of the northeastern US, sectarians were trying to get a couple of the gigs canceled, and probably unrelated to any of that, my mother decided it was time to stop eating and die, which she ultimately did earlier this month, at home in Boston, with her daughter by her side (and her son walking back from a coffee run).

Aside from all that, some of the most intense experiences I've been having lately have been between me and my laptop.

Everything in the world seems to happen so fast these days, that taking a moment to think about the past, even the recent past, feels like a luxury that no one has time for.  But if sometime in the future anyone is wondering what it was like for the first generation of professional musicians to come to terms with a world in which AI music-generation platforms could now pass the musical Turing Test with flying colors, then posts like this one will perhaps be your first draft of that history.

The experience has thrown me into a fairly constant state of philosophizing about the nature of being human, the nature of being a musician, and the implications for these things presented to us by our new reality.  I was raised by two professional musicians from the world of classical music -- a concert pianist and a composer.  Then since I was a teenager I have been steeped in the culture of the folk music scene, and steeped in various left and progressive social movements in various countries.  My experience over the past few months of writing songs with what I call my AI band has caused me to think about all of that, with the sort of involuntary intensity that I associate with the way people talk about seeing their lives flash by in front of their eyes when they think they're about to die.

People often tell me I'm a prolific songwriter.  Traditionally, if you record more than one album per year, you're edging in the direction of someone calling you prolific, so the bar is set very low.  But by most standards, anyway, I do write a lot of songs.  Since collaborating for years now with mostly remote musical partners like especially Chet Gardiner, which has also largely coincided with Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, I've been putting out an album of topical songs every two or three months.

Since I've been working with my AI band, over the past few months, I've written and "recorded" an average of about one song per day.  And these aren't just songs, they are good songs.  They are largely songs about current events, as good as any others I have written, except that I'm not the one singing the lyrics, and there is quite a bit more stylistic variation in every aspect of the songs, because with an AI band there are no limitations as far as available session musicians who play oud, shamisen, or whatever it is I want to hear.

There is no doubt in my mind that although I have written and recorded some pretty catchy songs with human musicians throughout my musical career, my AI band is at least as capable as me or any other human songwriter that I know of at coming up with memorably catchy melodies, refrains, instrumental riffs, ways of vocalizing that bring out the meanings and double-meanings in various lyrics, and everything else.

That AI-generated music is now generally indistinguishable from human music is a realization I have been involuntarily provoking with a fair number of people at this point.  While I'm sure it's inevitable that this would soon have happened to them anyway, being the original bearer of the news comes with mixed emotions.  I remember well how I felt when I first had this realization, several months ago in Australia, just before I started playing with the technology myself.

Last Sunday it was raining all day, and I haven't yet purchased a good canopy for such eventualities, so for our weekly neighborhood vigil for Gaza we didn't really have a setup that allowed for live performers to stay entirely dry.  So I figured I'd at least set up my fancy speaker and play recorded music via my phone's bluetooth connection with it.

Among the eighty or so songs I've written with my AI band, ten of them have been about Palestine.  I have those songs collected together in a playlist on Soundcloud, and I was playing that playlist.  The production values with these recordings are so high, it's really great music for playing in such circumstances, as the sound effectively cuts through the rain and traffic.  Plus a lot of what I've been doing has a hip-hop groove to it, so it's a good backdrop for keeping people moving, and feeling warmer and dryer than they may actually be.

One of the other regulars at the vigil, also a musician, asked me who the artist was that we were listening to.  When I explained to him that I wrote the lyrics, but that no human was otherwise involved with producing the sounds we were hearing, he looked like he'd seen a ghost.

Wade went off to hold a sign for quite a while before I saw him again.  "I feel like I was hit by a sledgehammer," he said.

No further explanation was necessary, but we talked lots more about it all anyway.

I guess when I'm talking about using an AI music-generation platform, I'm talking about an activity that only about 1% of the population has thus far engaged in.  And I guess when I'm talking about writing and recording songs, I'm also talking about an activity only a tiny portion of the population is familiar with from personal experience.

Either way, it's worth discussing a little, with or without AI, why would someone play music, and specifically write and record songs, in the first place?  The question may be more complicated than it seems, for a variety of reasons.

People play music in the first place because their parents signed them up for piano lessons, or because they were drawn towards playing the guitar because they noticed it was a good way to attract a potential date, or just because they enjoyed playing music.  But by the time they might be writing or recording at a professional level, in whatever genre, what's it all about?

Of course in some genres it may be about producing the right kind of formulaic hit material so you might stand to make lots of money in the music industry.  In other genres that's much less of a calculation.

What I've always run across, from people within my parents' classical/concert music circles as well as from veterans of the folk revival, and just from serious artists generally, is for real artists it's all about the art, and effectively communicating what that piece of art, that song, or that instrumental or whatever else, wants to communicate.

This orientation has always been in contradiction with the orientation heavily promoted by the music industry's PR machine for the past century and more, which involves making big stars out of specific artists, rather than the particular songs they're recording as such.  It's the name of the artist, their likeness, the sound of their voices, their dance moves, their fashion sense, etc., that is the center of attention when it comes to the promotion within the industry.

Little do most fans of any given artist know, but most of those stars are singing songs pitched to their managers from songwriters that exist within the corporate ecosystem of the label.  The instrumentation, the style of playing, what the band members look like, how they all dress, most all of that stuff is decided by someone other than the artist.

But all the while the PR machine focuses on the individual artists and how exceptionally brilliant they supposedly are, while they're promoting some version of a rags-to-riches story about an artist who writes all their own material, and bullshitting the whole way, a significant and serious subset of artists reject the whole thing, because we know it's always been all about the art, not the artist.

Perhaps more than anything else, being raised by a concert pianist and a composer helped for me to develop this perspective early on.

My mother could play anything on the piano, up to the most demanding, technical "avant garde" concert music.  But she would always say it wasn't about impressing anyone with her technical abilities, it was about playing the music, communicating what the piece you were playing was trying to communicate.  Effectively interpreting the intentions of the composer.

As a composer, and a brilliant pianist himself, my father would play approximations of symphonic pieces he was writing on a keyboard, to give himself and others an idea of what he was working on, which might only really be truly heard when it was performed by a symphony, or whatever type of ensemble he was writing for.  Until then, it was music on paper, but not something recorded, that anyone could listen to.  For it to exist in that form, people other than the composer would need to be very involved.

While the music industry was doing its thing and making stars out of various artists, for the industry's commercial purposes, so many real artists continued to pursue art for the sake of art, or for the sake of the power it had to communicate.  Within the folk music revival in the early 1960's many people have talked about how what all the songwriters in the scene were hoping to do was to write a song that others would mistake for an old folk song.  If you could write a song that people assumed was an old traditional, you had succeeded in writing a really good song.  If no one might suspect you wrote it, this was a good thing.

As a composer, my dad worked with a lot of poets and those who dealt in the realm of words and lyrics.  Words were never his thing, so much as music.  There's a long tradition there of artists orienting more towards one or another aspect of the whole thing.  Lots of songwriting partnerships, where one was more about the lyrics and the other more about the music.

As a songwriter myself, I have always found it easier to come by interesting lyrics than fresh music to go with them and make those lyrics really come alive.  As I'm writing a lyric I can start to tell if it's one that could really become a good song, with the right musical treatment.  I often write a good, almost complete lyric in twenty minutes, and then I'll spend hours, or days, trying to come up with a really good musical vehicle for those lyrics.  That part of the process is just as important, and, for me, much more challenging.

I have sometimes successfully risen to the occasion on that front, and often not.  I have often settled for music that was too predictable, and didn't serve the lyrics the way music can do.  I have often written lyrics that never found music.  Of course, other people have this whole thing in reverse, but that's how it's always been for me.

During the pandemic, when I had a lot of time on my hands and extra income, I did a whole album together with Jane Reynolds/Virtual Bird (It's Been A Year), where I sent them lyrics and they turned them into catchy songs.

At many other points, touring with people who sang harmonies with me, and the years to date of remote collaboration with Chet, knowing that songs I write will often be heard with harmonies, or they'll be recorded with the kind of cool things Chet is likely to do to stuff I send him to work with, my tendencies as a songwriter go towards thinking about what things might sound like with vocal harmonies, or thinking about leaving more sonic space for Chet to work with as he adds layers of instrumentation to a given song.

Working with my AI band does bear various things in common with the experience of recording with other people, and even more in common with the project with Virtual Bird.

But more than anything it bears more in common with the notion of being a lyricist working with session musicians of my choice, that may or may not differ completely from song to song.  I am otherwise completely removed from the recording in the sense that I am not the recording artist here, and neither are any other humans with their various talents and limitations.

Being a songwriter with a lot of experience as far as writing a song that is going to work, that serves its purpose well, one of the things that I've always been so impressed by when working with the many musicians I've worked with to produce a whole bunch of albums over the past few years is how often it happens that I send off a song lyric to Virtual Bird or a guitar-and-vocal recording to Chet, and the first thing they do with it is perfect.  Both experienced recording artists and performers themselves, they know what works and what doesn't, and any changes I might make to their first draft is usually going to be cosmetic.

That's never how it goes with my AI band.  The first draft is never the keeper.  But after refining prompts and editing lyrics and spacing and such, within ten or twenty or thirty iterations, invariably, we land upon an interpretation of the lyric that just nails it.

And all of those thirty iterations happen in the space of ten or twenty minutes.  And it only takes that long because it takes me a little listening to determine what needs to be adjusted next.

But it's not the outrageous speed in going from lyric to brilliantly-recorded song that is the most intoxicating thing about working with the AI band.  It's the potential to be anyone, playing anything.  As with being a composer, I can write for whoever I want to, whatever instruments.  One song may be acoustic hip-hop with oud, the next newgrass chanson skiffle.  And after singing as a male for my entire life, I find writing for a female voice is something I haven't grown the least bit bored with yet.

I'm quite certain that it is also because I can now write for a female voice who can deliver lyrics in much more popular musical idioms than the ones I generally play myself that some of the songs have already gotten picked up and shared more widely than I suspect they would have otherwise, most notably "No Contract No Coffee" among striking Starbucks workers.

Whether or to what extent that happens with other songs is of course unknown, but whether they are good songs, well-written and well-recorded, with catchy refrains, etc., in my humble opinion, there's no doubt.

Because some AI-generated music has gotten very popular, and this has made big news stories, some people assume if we're playing with AI music generating platforms, we're headed towards wealth and fame.  This has certainly not been the case for most musicians using AI music-generation platforms, since most pro-level musicians already do that, and the future is obviously going to be more full of AI slop than anyone can imagine.

Looking not at Ai Tsuno on the dominant streaming platform, Spotify, but at David Rovics, if you click on different albums in the discography and see which tracks have received any plays over the past month (which is what those numbers represent), you'll see that the vast majority of my songs are in the single or double digits.  Looking at all of these tiny numbers, if you start wondering where those overall monthly listener numbers are coming from (currently around 18,000), you'll see that it is just a handful of songs that each get a couple thousand streams.  Just those few songs that made it into the algorithms and the playlists and get circulated on the platform.  The rest, such as most of what I've recorded over the past decade, is largely invisible.

Ai Tsuno will probably be similarly invisible, like most good music is and has always been, since there was a music industry.  But if a given song, recorded by humans or AI, may serve the cause for which it was written, then it's probably good that it exists.

Suno, Spotify, and the Hearts and Minds

Is that the name of a band?

I've been sharing a lot of music on the usual corporate social media platforms lately, and though most people who open an email and click play don't comment, those who are commenting are doing so more than usual, and it's all over the map.

It's all very complicated, and to a huge degree, I feel like we're mostly talking past each other.  There are a lot of different things that can be very contradictory, and very true, all at the same time.  Understanding this is key to making any sense of the world around us.  (Marx and Lao Tzu both thought so, too, among others.)

According to my recent internet queries, about half of the adult population of the US has used a modern AI chatbot like ChatGPT.  Among those who have used one, most now use them regularly.  The other half of the population has never used one.

Among musicians and certain music enthusiasts, the AI technology of great interest are the musical equivalents of ChatGPT, such as Suno.  Among musicians, depending on how you measure these things, a majority are making use of AI music-generation platforms these days.  But among the general population, only around 1% have used such platforms.

The vast majority of people who listen to music do so via a music streaming platform.  Spotify is the most popular of them, in the US and most other countries.  Among young people, the vast majority uses Spotify on a weekly basis.  Or they end up on the platform, the way older people end up clicking on a Facebook Event link even if they otherwise may have nothing to do with Facebook.

Spotify led the way in lowering payouts to artists so they could offer their services for free (with ads), and in so doing they destroyed the livelihoods of millions of musicians who had been largely dependent on CD and download sales.  Then, in becoming the dominant streaming platform globally, Spotify became one of the more significant sources of income for many musicians who survived this transition.

For most people who are looking for work or still employed, using AI platforms is now part of the gig, it's required that you be proficient in these things.

While monopolistic corporations like Spotify and data-scraping AI platforms like ChatGPT and Suno are upending most professions dramatically, very much including all of those related to music, and while these platforms have all sorts of other negative things associated with them such as energy use in the case of AI, and Spotify running ICE recruitment ads (along with most other major US media platforms), AI as well as Spotify have also made themselves essential to the work and the social lives of an absolutely massive portion of global society.

This is true, even while the dust has by no means settled with regards to the lawsuits and campaigns involved with artists and authors and others trying to have a say in how or if our work is used to train these Large Language Models and music-generation platforms.  The lawsuits and boycotts continue, and it also continues to be the case that AI is transforming most industries drastically, and in the process making itself completely essential for anyone trying to remain employed.

It's also amazing technology.

OK, now I'll try to make all of these somewhat disparate thoughts work together somehow.  I'll start with a story.

I had long been lamenting the lack of live music at protests these days.  While traveling in Australia several months ago my singing partner and I sang at some protests, but we attended others that had no music at all in the program, a phenomenon we've grown sadly accustomed to.

But then I noticed, there in Australia, an odd phenomenon developing.  It's one that I then would see replicated elsewhere, particularly at Palestine solidarity events, such as a couple months ago in Milwaukee.

Maybe you've been to protests like this and you've run across what I'm talking about.  That is, bands that sound as formulaically Nashville as they can get, with extremely high production values, sounding like a song that just came out of the hottest recording studio with the tightest band of session musicians doing exactly as they're told, and where the singer is singing stuff about the suffering of Palestinians, in a way that just seems a bit completely bizarre.

What the hell is going on here, I wondered.  The response from one of the wonderful folks going around Australia and blasting music and speeches everywhere with a Palestine flag as a cape was he was using Suno to make these songs.  My guess is he put the lyrics in there and gave Suno a one-word command like "country-western."

Sometime after returning home from that tour and having time for random activities again, I got a Suno account and started playing with it.

Playing with it for just a little while, it was obvious both that this would be the end of whatever was left of the music industry as it once existed, and that this technology was mind-blowingly amazing.

These are obviously two very contradictory truths.  The music industry was already a shell of its former self due to the rise of free streaming platforms that hardly pay royalties, compared to how it used to be with terrestrial radio, CD sales, and even downloads.  But this technology would be it.

As with the way these technologies are upending the rest of every other profession, it's never been clearer that technological progress, such as it is, can't be allowed to just destabilize everything like this all the time, with people expected somehow to manage to find work and pay rent under these circumstances.  Can it?

I don't know what the answer to this vitally important question might be, but what's obvious is the tech is here, it's being widely used and more so by the day, it's objectively profoundly amazing, and the idea of not using it is like sticking to wax cylinders now that everyone else is using 78s.

In some ways it's not at all surprising that the first time I was exposed to this technology was at a Palestine solidarity event.

Back in the early days of the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO film unit was trying to make English-language videos that might get out there in the US and Europe and other parts of the world where public opinion regarding developments in the Middle East might make a difference.

There were (and are) many musicians singing in Arabic that everyone in the region loved, but the PLO film unit was trying to reach the English speakers, so they had a Palestinian woman singing a song in English, which I have noticed half a century later is a song still circulating in English-language Palestine solidarity circles.

Today at Palestine solidarity rallies run by Arabic-speakers, you'll commonly hear Arabic-language songs about the Palestinian struggle, sung by popular artists from the region.

You'll also increasingly hear the kinds of songs I was hearing in Australia and Milwaukee, written by people who are using technology to try to bridge the gap between their Arab selves and the wider English-speaking world.  Are they all fans of country-western music?  I don't know.  I suspect they realize this is a popular form of music in the US and Australia, which it is, and they want to communicate using a popular art form with people who speak English.

The high production values of the songs recorded with these platforms works brilliantly in the protest setting, with a clarity of sound that cuts through, in the way that not long ago only an expensive studio recording with professional engineers and session musicians might approach.

As what we might call a "real" artist, the kind of music I have been able to elicit from Suno far exceeds what I have heard at these protests, I will humbly submit.  The best prompt engineers for creating music are naturally going to be the "real" musicians, just as the best prompt engineers for creating visual art are going to be "real" artists, and the best prompt engineers for vibe-coding apps are going to be the "real" programmers, etc.

Say you're writing powerful lyrics and setting them to great music that sounds really great, too.  Should you not release these songs, because your band was AI?  Just because you can write and record a great song every day with this technology, does that mean the songs aren't as good anymore?  Do these songs serve the people, in the way songs can do, any less than other songs might?

With Spotify the argument goes the same way.  Spotify achieved its dominant position through paying artists very little and still losing money at it for many years, wiping out so much of the competition in the process, and making the surviving competition lower their payouts and offer ad-supported versions of their product in order to compete.

But now that Spotify plays the role of the virtual living room for hundreds of millions of regular users, should artists stop using it?  If we take our material off of the platform, will that do anything aside from cause us to lose a lot of fans and money?

All the arguments against Spotify that I'm familiar with are correct, and I make them often myself.  We can make the same kinds of arguments against General Motors, but that doesn't mean Ford is all that much better.  We need a different system altogether, in so many ways, very much including for Spotify and ChatGPT, but we're way past the stage of effectively being able to boycott such dominant platforms.  Or at least, if an artist does so, all that happens is they lose audience and lose money.  Almost all the ones that leave for one reason or another end up soon returning because of these reasons.

What I want is to win the hearts and minds of the people out there who speak my language.  English is a big language, but a lot of people out there aren't into the styles of music I usually play.  With AI music generation platforms I can make some very powerful music with a much broader array of stylistic variation than I would normally be capable of without much greater effort, and the involvement of many other musicians.

I want to win those hearts and minds on the platforms that are available to me.  Spotify is the biggest of them, and the one whose algorithms most effectively introduce my music to new listeners, at the rate of thousands every month.  For whatever reason(s), on the US-based platforms my music gets much less traction than on this Stockholm-based streaming giant.

It's not surprising that with all that's going on, people have lots of opinions to share about AI and about Spotify, both.  As someone who is actively promoting music I've written with an AI band, and doing so on Spotify, among other places, I've regularly been hearing from people who are critical of me having my music on Spotify, and people who think it's awful that I'm using AI for any purpose.

For all the good reasons to criticize Spotify and AI platforms, the idea of criticizing people for using them seems a lot like criticizing people for driving their electric car on a highway.  I have literally been involved with protesting the building of highways in various parts of the world.  But once they're there, the idea of avoiding them in the effort of getting from point A to point B becomes a bit ridiculous.  Even more so when your job depends on you driving that car on that highway, to deliver your next pizza or whatever you're doing to make ends meet.

Lots of people listening to my recent musical efforts that I'm calling the artist Ai Tsuno have been full of praise.  But especially among those who don't listen out of principle, there's a lot of criticism.

It reminds me of the criticism of Milli Vanilli for being caught lip-syncing, or Taylor Swift claiming she wrote all her own songs.  There are expectations people have of artists, who then try to maintain those illusions, in line with industry practice.  And then the ire of the public generally doesn't go to the PR people who tell the artists how to dress, how to act, and what to say, but to the artists whose fabricated bio gets exposed in one way or another.

According to polls I've seen, most musicians are using AI, and most musicians are cagey about admitting to it publicly.  It's easy to see why, for a variety of reasons.

I'll just keep erring on the side of using whatever tools are at my disposal for making great music, in the interest of reaching the most people with the kinds of songs that I think could make a difference, especially if heard widely.  I'll put those songs on whichever platforms might get them out there, and that definitely includes Spotify.

I hope those people who are horrified by the billionaires and their corporate practices will continue to be horrified, and demand a world where everyone can prosper, one way or another.  We all need to organize a movement capable of addressing such profound questions.

But for the time being, there are fascists taking over a bunch of different countries like this one, and they are participating in genocides in places like Gaza.  If we keep burning fossil fuels it'll soon spell the end of life on Earth.  I'll personally be using whatever tools are available to use to communicate about those things, and maybe some other time worry about harassing artists for using AI and putting their AI music on Spotify.

Here's my AI playlist for the next Palestine solidarity rally that has a bluetooth speaker.

davidrovics · Ai Tsuno for Palestine

The Joy of Tsuno

David and Ai come out of the closet.  And into your ears...?

I'd like to talk with you about Artificial Intelligence.  I know from talking with many of my friends, fans and acquaintances that there is both vast skepticism and vast ignorance out there about what AI is, what it can do, and where the future is going.

The skepticism -- or even outright opposition -- is thoroughly understandable, for lots of reasons, and I share it.  We're talking about technology being developed by billionaires who probably don't have humanity's best interests at heart.  Technology that many, many experts in the field are afraid is going to soon become so advanced that humans can't control it anymore.  And technology that is already replacing massive numbers of jobs in just about every conceivable field, and will be doing that at an exponentially increasing rate in the near future.

The question of how humans are to survive in a future where most of what we currently get paid to do will be replaced by AI and robots is a very important question, obviously.  The question of how we continue to have human scientists, academics, lawyers, doctors, artists, drivers, warehouse workers, factory workers, or any number of other professions in a world where most everything can be done as well or better, and much faster, by a computer or a robot, is obviously very important.  It's way beyond compensating whoever it was that created the content from which AI got educated.  We're not talking just about the future of researchers, writers, or musicians, but of humanity as a whole.

Important questions that need answers, and the answers can be found in things like having a government that is working on behalf of the people, and engaged with direct and extensive regulation of the tech companies, and the institution of some kind of Universal Basic Income.  There are many other good answers to the question of how artists, intellectuals and people with jobs of all other sorts survive in a society that no longer needs us nearly as much as it used to.  And I'll now leave those questions for another time.

If you want to have some idea of how amazing AI music-generation technology is right now, I would like to invite you to listen to Ai Tsuno.  Ai Tsuno is the name I chose for my collaborative musical efforts with Suno, which is one of a number of different AI music generation platforms in popular use today.

I know so many people who really seem to be suffering from some form of future shock with all this stuff, and they avoid ever listening to, looking at, or reading anything they know to be AI-generated content.  While I completely agree with anyone who says that the internet is massively polluted these days with ever-more abundant and ever-more realistic AI slop of every conceivable description, to just dismiss AI technology because of this is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

First of all, don't take my word for it.  If you haven't heard Ai Tsuno's latest album, Army of Robots, or the one before that, Where the Algorithms Rule, take a few minutes to go to the music streaming platform of your choice and listen to a couple songs.  Then come back to me here.

If you're like most of the people who actually bothers to check it out, you're now in a slight state of shock at how good it sounds, how human the voice sounds, how she seems to really understand what she's singing about, how she reacts vocally to different words that mean different things, really communicating.  You've probably noticed how inventive each song is in terms of instrumentation, melodies and harmonies, and of course how incredibly high the production values are for everything you're hearing.

To be clear, what you're hearing is, to no small degree, the power of this technology, and it would be wrong to under-emphasize that.  However, what you're hearing is as good as it is because I wrote the lyrics, and I'm the musician with vast experience writing and recording songs under my belt who is working with Suno to come up with the music for each track.

If it were not me doing this, or some other competent, experienced recording artist, it would suck, and it would sound like AI slop.  Every one of these songs involves many, and often many dozen, inadequate efforts at coming up with good music for my lyrics.  At first the phrasing might be stilted, or emphasizing the wrong bits in weird ways that sounds easily identifiable as AI slop.  But when I keep refining the prompts and editing the lyrics in various ways, ultimately, every time, Suno eventually arrives at an amazing arrangement for the song.

I have recorded a lot of records with a lot of great musicians in a lot of studios.  It would be impossible to over-emphasize the importance of this fact, in terms of what I'm able to get out of Suno, compared to someone who lacks this kind of background.  I've heard what so many other people do with Suno who don't have this kind of background, and although the production values are always amazing, it's also generally easy to identify as AI slop.  But hearing these tracks I keep hearing along the way in life, the potential was undeniable, and I had to try it.

Working with Suno is, in fact, very much like working with human studio musicians.

I made that thought it's own paragraph, to let it sink in a bit.  We have these notions about originality, we humans, and artists more than most.  We like to think there's something special about being human, that can't be done just as well or better, in every possible way, by AI.  But it's not true, and that's easy to demonstrate.

All you have to do is a blind taste test kind of thing.  If you want to humble a French wine connoisseur, give them some wine from California and see if they can tell where it's from.  Try doing the same with sharing an AI-generated piece of music with someone, and you'll get the same reaction.  They can't tell the difference, they only think they can.  It's all gotten way too good for that.  The days when you could easily tell the difference are over.  (Same with what they used to call "deep fake videos.")

What does it mean to be human?  What makes us unique or different from computers?  What is it that these Large Language Models are trained on and how do they make use of all that training?

Full disclosure:  I haven't tried using Suno to write lyrics.  I have played with various LLM's to get them to write lyrics, however, and I've been completely unimpressed with what they come up with.  It seems clear that if they're working with the body of the tens of millions of songs that have been recorded in the world that are available to listen to, it's no surprise they shouldn't be very good at writing lyrics, since most human recording artists are working with badly-written lyrics to begin with, by my estimation at least.

But along with the available millions of badly-written songs Suno has to work with, it also has millions of songs to work with that involve great session musicians playing great music, of every kind.  So much of the time they are playing according to one formula or another, that fits into one genre or another.  Most of it is not at all inventive or interesting, and sounds like the music industry equivalent of mass-produced bubble gum, as far as creative input goes.

Which is also what you can easily get from session musicians or from Suno today.  But if you're working with great session musicians, or if you're working with Suno, you can give them instructions -- prompts -- that make all the difference.  That's why when you listen to Ai Tsuno's recent albums you may think this stuff sounds so fresh and interesting.  That's because the platform is amazing and has the whole of human musical output to refine itself with, but it's also because I'm telling it to play things like "newgrass chanson hip-hop with a dark, modal sound."  Ever heard a newgrass chanson hip-hop band?  Me neither.  But Ai Tsuno does that style really well, along with klezmer cabaret skiffle with satirical but sexy vibes, and a lot of other styles no one's ever heard of.

We humans, we artists, we workers, whoever we are -- we don't get to choose a lot of things.  Speaking specifically to my fellow musicians, we didn't decide a century ago that most of our jobs playing in taverns should go away and be replaced by radios.  But when that happened, we all damn well did whatever we could to get on those radio programs.  We didn't decide that Spotify should start up its free tier and sabotage our livelihoods, causing millions of us to stop playing music for a living, unable to make ends meet anymore because of the death of CD sales and downloads.  But we damn well have done our best to get our music on those Spotify playlists, and get what revenue and what attention we can get on the platform that is now the way most people listen to music.

And we didn't decide that these new platforms should use all of our music and everyone else's in order to train their models and make them so amazing, as they are now.  But now that this has been done, and the genie is out of the bottle, I will bet anyone any amount of money that the genie is not going back in the bottle, and this technology is only going to continue to improve, to the extent that that's even possible.

These are our new tools.  As with all the other transformative technologies, its potential for having all kinds of devastating impacts on humanity and the future of human culture is clear.  But it's not going to go away just because many of us might not want to use the technology or listen to music created with it.

Along with the devastating aspects, the prospects with this technology to create so much more music that can be employed in the interests of popular education, movement-building, and the promotion of crucially important ideas and histories, and to create such catchy and beautiful tunes so quickly with such high production values, is amazing.

I will certainly not stop writing lyrics that I will come up with music for myself, and record myself, in my voice, with other human musicians.  Even in the months since I've been obsessively writing with Suno, some of my best songs, with the most interesting music overall, have not involved Suno at all.  But I think it's only right to have the humility, as a human songwriter, to admit the reality that Suno can come up with cool music to my lyrics at least as well as I can, generally, Suno can do this in a fraction of the time it would take for me to do it, and then this process happens at the same time as Suno also leaves you with a very high-quality recording of the song you just wrote together.

I do not have the nut cracked as far as how to get this music out there.  The name an artist has built for themselves is largely our currency, you could say.  The songs I record with my voice are the ones that get into Spotify's algorithms when I release a new David Rovics album.  Ai Tsuno still has a global listenership that is barely in the double digits.

Although I'm the lyricist for everything Ai Tsuno sings, I felt that having an alter ego with a different name made sense, since I'm only responsible for the music as the prompt engineer and producer.

But it also seems worth noting, especially for anyone out there who doesn't know much about how the music industry works, that most pop stars or other recording artists you might be familiar with do not write any of their own songs.  Other people do, like the many professional songwriters in places like Nashville who just write songs, and may not perform themselves much at all.  They write songs for the stars to sing -- that's what they do.  This has been how the music industry has functioned since it started, over a century ago, with the rise of records and radio, up to the present day.

When you listen to the songs through the ages that have become hits, you may notice that there's a catchy guitar riff or bass riff or something the harmony singers are doing in the chorus that ends up defining the really cool and catchy sound of a given song.  Those session musicians who may have come up with the guitar riff or harmony line may get credit in the liner notes that few people read, but otherwise, the fact that what may make the song so good may have had little to do with the actual songwriter who wrote the lyrics or the one who came up with the chords and melody, but with some other factor like the inventive things the studio musicians did during the recording of the album, will generally become a footnote in terms of the legacy of a hit song.  But in reality, as any honest recording artist knows, it is often just those sorts of things that make a song come alive.

And as a human musician with a lot of experience as a human musician, I have to say up front right here that for better or for worse, some of the best session musicians I've ever worked with have been human, and others have not.  I encourage you to judge for yourselves and listen.

Anne Chamberlain, 1938-2025

My mother, Anne Chamberlain, died on the morning of November 7th, at the age of 87.

The most awkward part of the process of her dying has been people reaching out to me with empathy, and sharing their very touching experiences with the deaths of their parents, talking about how much they loved their mothers and how close they were with them.  People tend to make assumptions that other people experience life more or less as they do, naturally.  But the world isn't like that.

I may have little of that sort of mushy stuff to share, but I do feel compelled to touch on a number of different themes related to Anne, her life, my relationship with her, and her death.

Anne was the second of four daughters of John Seymour Chamberlain and Margaret Golson.  (If Margaret had a middle name, I never knew what it was.)  Anne was born on February 22nd, 1938, on the island of Manhattan, where she would make sure both of her children would be born later.

Anne was a sort of anti-elitist elitist the whole time I knew her, which was a while.  "Anti-elitist elitist" is a phrase I coined to describe her, many decades ago.  As an anti-elitist elitist, she never had much interest in her own family history.  This was probably because her father was deeply interested in his family history, and his eldest two daughters had an especially bad time growing up under his abusive parenting.  His parenting improved in time for the next two girls that came along, and he was a warm and loving grandfather for many grandchildren later.

Seymour, as Anne's father was known, was so proud of the Seymour line of his ancestry that he gave all four of his daughters the same middle name -- Seymour.  The Seymour line dates back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066.  They were founding members of the English aristocracy, back when it spoke French.

Anne's father's grandfather, or maybe great grandfather, was Jacob Chamberlain, from Seneca Falls, New York.  Jacob was a founder of the abolitionist Free Soil Party in 1848, and a founder of the abolitionist Republican Party in 1854.

Anne's mother, Margaret, was a descendant of Irish refugees who went to Alabama, which was where Margaret grew up.  She went to university in Louisiana, and then traveled to far-off New York City to pursue a career in music.  Instead of the music career, she married a businessman and raised four children, all of whom also went to college and became accomplished musicians themselves.

Despite being from a family of musicians, with more musicians in every direction of the family tree you look at, from an early age Anne developed the notion that the great musician in the family was going to be her, and her alone.

She did go on to become a world-class concert pianist, spending the vast majority of her adult life teaching piano students.  Like so many great musicians, she never seriously pursued making a living as a performer, though she often talked about the idea, and often seemed to be suggesting that if she hadn't made the decision to have kids, she would have pursued that avenue.  When she talked about this dream of music teachers to be full-time performers, she would always assure me that she had no regrets about having had kids.

Back in the days when people bought records, classical music made up 1% of the music market.  (Similar, incidentally, to how much of the music market folk music takes up.)  Within that 1% of the market, the kind of music my dad wrote and my mom was most passionate about playing, what they called Avant Garde music back in the 1960's -- also known as 12-tonal, atonal, or just "concert music" -- made up a small fraction of those who listened to classical music.

Most listeners of classical music didn't and don't like this stuff.  The idea of making a living playing it was always a fantasy to begin with -- no one does that.  Even if you get a much-coveted job playing for a symphony orchestra somewhere in the world, there aren't any that only play that kind of music, or they'd largely be playing for the crickets.  Back in the 1960's, the main orchestras in the world that played my dad's music were in eastern Europe, where everything was heavily subsidized, of course.

Being part of a tiny little group of highly-accomplished performers of a type of music hardly anyone listened to never stopped Anne from believing in her greatness, the greatness of classical music, the plebian nature of all other forms of music, or of the ineptitude of most other musicians in the world.  She referred to them as people who "played music" or "played the piano," rather than people who were musicians.

Growing up in the woodsy suburbs of Wilton, Connecticut, where Anne and her music professor husband Howard moved to from Manhattan around 1970, my bedroom and my sister's bedroom were on either side of the bedroom that our parents shared with a Steinway grand piano.  On most mornings, Howard would go to his makeshift studio in the basement of the house, and their bedroom would become Anne's studio.  

Sometime around dawn she'd begin to play music.  Although her main bread and butter was teaching private students, she always had some kind of upcoming performance to practice for.  These hours of most mornings were an involuntary and very impressive sort of master class in how to practice impossibly complicated passages and learn to play them perfectly every time.

Then came the students, many of whom were naturally coming for their lessons after school was over, which was also when school was over for my sister and I, too.

My stomach churns to even think about what it was like to listen to Anne work with those students day after day, year after year.

For a short while, she was teaching students at the private hippie elementary school I was lucky enough to attend, but she was soon disinvited from teaching kids there, because of her teaching style, which did not correspond at all to the methodology prevalent at that wonderful institution.

Anne's teaching style was nothing like the caring, encouraging style of the teachers at the Learning Community.  Anne's methodology, such as it was, involved a near-constant stream of dismissive comments and insults.  She had one or two extremely dedicated students who were exceptionally good players, and they got off with far fewer insults, and even the occasional compliment.  The rest of her students were treated as if they were undeserving of her attention.  If they played a passage in a way Anne didn't like, she'd repeat the way they played it, in exaggerated form, mocking their lack of musicality.

How many children Anne alienated from music, I'll never know, but I imagine their ranks far exceed the number of kids who had positive experiences studying with her.  Yes, if they stuck with it, they probably got good at playing the piano, and at sightreading.  But at what emotional cost?

On a bad day, her parenting style was a lot like her teaching style.  On a good day, she kept her more pathological inclinations in check.  But as a general rule, what Anne did when she was awake and in the company of other people, if she wasn't playing music, was talk.  She talked, and others listened.  If you didn't respond occasionally and try to interject some kind of comment, she'd accuse you of not paying attention.  If you did make a comment, she'd accuse you of interrupting her.

This way, no matter what you said or didn't say, you could always be doing something wrong.  If you interjected with a comment that was merely agreeing with something she said, she could still manage -- almost every time -- to turn your agreement with her into something to argue with you about.

The biggest problem with people who are virtually unable to ever stop talking is, by definition, they're terrible listeners.  If anyone ever manages to say anything in their presence, the obsessive talker then finds a way to turn whatever they said into something that happened to them in their lives that they can then hold court about.  The other biggest problem is the incessant talkers generally have very little to talk about, in relation to their need to keep talking.  They run out of things to talk about and start repeating their stories, over and over again.

I assume I'm not the only one who knows a lot of people like this.  A great concentration of people like this can be found in New York City, especially among Jewish women of my mother's generation, and Jewish women of the next generation before hers as well.

Anne wasn't Jewish, but that's not the point.  You don't have to be Jewish to act like that, it's just that in my world most of the people who do act like that are Jewish, and female, and elderly.  I'm sure there were historical reasons why this kind of behavior became so commonplace, and maybe it had positive applications back in the shtetl that are hard to understand in the modern era.

By the same token, the stoic, reserved, introspective men like my father, and his father, have been another archetype I've grown up with, and probably emulated to a huge extent as well.  It represents just as much of a stereotype of a certain kind of New York Jewish man as my mother, or my father's mother, represented another stereotype.  I'm sure if I were more familiar with other subcultures I might make similar sweeping statements about them, too, but I'll save those for someone who knows what they're talking about.  I only know certain little corners of certain subcultures at all well, such as certain elements of New York society from whence my parents came.

The impact, of course, of being raised by someone who talks incessantly like a broken record and has no real capacity to engage in a meaningful way with her children or with most anyone else who doesn't just want to be talked at, is devastating.  I wouldn't change my past if I could, and I've always felt that my reaction to this kind of parenting, which involved escaping into the solace of my internal world, probably helped turn me into who I am today, which is hopefully a good thing.  But it's like being raised by a bulldozer, and the recovery has been long and slow.

I have always been grateful for the presence of my father growing up.  Although it was always clear that Anne was in charge of everything, Howard always treated his children not only with affection, which Anne was also full of, but also with a keen sense of the fragility of these little beings, his children, and he always treated us with dignity and respect, with none of the scolding that Anne felt the need to deliver so often.  She would say that he was leaving all of that important work to her, since, as was obvious to her, someone had to do it.

Anne had been my earliest and biggest introduction to progressive politics, though it wasn't until I was probably over 50 that I really began to take in what a profound influence she had on me as far as the development of my worldview went.

Howard's interest in Taoism, Buddhism, group therapy, dream analysis, and all sorts of New Age stuff like that presented me with good tools for trying to work through having been raised by a bulldozer.  Psychedelic drugs helped a lot, too.  My daily cannabis habit has always been a coping mechanism, to try to maintain an even keel, of the sort that my mother could never have.

Although Anne spent much of my childhood dismissing what she called "popular music" as some kind of primitive and uninteresting slop, in relation to real, classical music, and although she frequently expressed her special contempt for people who picked up an instrument and just improvised on it, when her son stopped playing classical music and developed an interest in various crass forms of popular music, Anne was supportive.

Anne always strove to be supportive of her kids in the ways she could.  When the public elementary school didn't seem to be good for her kids, she sought out a wonderful hippie private school for us.  The first time I went into a real music studio to work with real musicians and record an album, Anne paid for the whole thing.  When it became clear that public school was not the place we wanted to send our kids in Portland, Anne volunteered to help pay for us to send our kids to a Waldorf school.  I could easily go on with more similar examples.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned from growing up was that I never wanted to treat people the way my mother or my grandmother or other people I knew like that treated people.  When I walk into a store or a restaurant, I don't want people to be glad when that terrible customer finally leaves.  And when I have children, I thought, I want to listen to them.

The best book I eventually read about raising kids was titled Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves by Naomi Aldort.  One of the most interesting things about reading that book was how familiar so many of the examples of bad parenting were to me, from my childhood with Anne.  I have striven never to be dismissive or insulting towards my kids or anyone else, since becoming a parent myself.  I wish I could say I have entirely succeeded in this endeavor, but the programming learned from childhood has ways of manifesting itself again and again.

When I was 18 or so, my parents got divorced.  For years I had been encouraging my father to get away from what I increasingly viewed as an abusive relationship, because it was obvious to me that no one deserved to be treated like this.  I guess my hope was that he'd leave her, and take the kids with him.  I hadn't really thought that part through, in retrospect.  When he finally did leave her, it wasn't really under his own steam, but due to circumstances he hadn't planned on -- an affair exposed.

My hope for my dad to get into a good relationship happened, and he lived happily ever after (now aged 89, and no longer reading essays like this one, but still playing the piano beautifully).

Anne spent the rest of her life after her divorce living alone, in a perpetual state of loneliness, as far as I could tell.  She continued to teach, participate in various social events and committees, play organ at church, and for probably 15 different summers she rented her house and spent the summer traveling.  She went to Israel, Romania, Greece, France, and many other countries, including 10 summers spent in Ha Noi, Vietnam, working with classical musicians there.  

But although she seemed to clearly have a desire to have a partner in life, and talked about this in one way or another often when I visited her (along with her continual feelings of betrayal and resentment towards her ex-husband), she never hooked up with one, to my knowledge.  She had some friends who she would see now and then, but over time it became clear that mostly she talked about these friends, and didn't really see them much at all.  They were more like friends in her mind, people she liked to think of as her friends, but not people she actually spent time with much at all.

Over the decades, her tendencies towards being the center of the universe only worsened.  A number of her old friends, who I've known since childhood, confided in me about how Anne was getting even more crotchety and difficult, to the point where they couldn't stand visiting her more than once a year or so.

The tracks on the broken record included certain repeated themes.  One was about how she never planned on having a divorce, and how much her ex-husband sucked for having an affair.  One was how much electric instruments of all kinds suck, and how society is going down because it's no longer commonplace for people to own real pianos.  One was about how only some people were real musicians and everyone else just played music.  One was about how saving the planet is the responsibility of all of us to cut down our consumption, which was a vehicle for her to complain about most other people for not doing that.  Another was about how if she is going to die, she doesn't want to be resuscitated.

All of these subjects were obsessions for her, that she talked about every day, to anyone who would listen.  They involved repeating the same stories from her life that involved some kind of realization or discovery about these subjects.  They often began with "stop me if you've heard this before," which was a pointless gesture -- the story was going to be repeated no matter what you said at that point.

Her death was one of her obsessions.  She began to talk with my sister Bonnie and I about this eventuality many decades ago, on a very regular basis.  She didn't want to be a vegetable, or to lose control of her body or mind, understandably enough.  And for whatever reason never professionally diagnosed, she had to talk about it every day.

As Anne got older, her hearing began to decline.  This, of course, is a common human experience as we age.  It's also very common for people at first to think these damn young people just don't know how to enunciate anymore, before they eventually come to realize that it is in fact their ears that are the main problem here.  Anne never got there, despite eventually very severe hearing loss.  Right up until the end, she insisted that anyone she couldn't understand was suffering from bad diction, including her own children.  Hopefully other people could hopefully have been entertained by how ridiculous her behavior had become, but for me it was just one trigger after another.

She had glaucoma in one eye, a bad knee, and few teeth remaining in her head.  She had been feeling like it was time to die, just because of these sorts of health conditions.  Then on October 10th, on the way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, riding with Bonnie and a car full of other folks to hear Kamala and I do a concert there, Anne had a mini-stroke of some kind, where she was speaking in tongues for twenty minutes or so.  She then decided she didn't want to go to doctors to figure out what had happened or get diagnosed or treated, she just wanted to call it quits.

Anne invited Kamala and I to have dinner with her in her granny flat beneath my sister's home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.  This dinner, she told us, would be her last, and it was.  That was October 13th, I think.  The three of us had a tasty quiche kind of thing with lots of kale that Anne had made.  Afterwards we all had some vanilla ice cream, which was Anne's last dessert.

Anne had long ago talked about Scott Nearing, and how he died by stopping eating.  Since then she read another book about VSED -- Voluntary Stopping Eating and Drinking.

My sister got the word out to family and friends of Anne's, some of whom Anne hadn't seen in decades.  Over the next couple weeks, Anne's surviving younger sisters came from New Jersey and California, Reiko and my kids all flew in from Oregon, and various friends and relatives from Connecticut and elsewhere came to pay respects.

If Anne had been planning to do the whole VSED thing, she altered her plan a bit, happy to have all these visitors.  Finally, perhaps for the first time in forty years, she had people around her at all times, all of them apparently happy to sit quietly and listen to her talk.

Given how thirsty all this talking made her, she moderated the VSED program to the extent that although she was spitting out most of the water she was sipping on to keep her mouth lubricated, she was drinking enough of it that she lived much longer than people typically do when they actually stop drinking water as well as eating food.

When she first decided to stop eating, I commented to her that if there was anything I wanted to talk about with her, I should do it now.  She was very intentional about making space for her and I to be alone, to facilitate that, which was very nice.  But I also knew that I had given up on trying to talk about her behavior towards me or other people a long time ago.  Not for lack of effort, but because it was obvious a long time ago that she was completely unable to see what she was doing.  She might be horrified to see someone else treat others the way she did, but her blind spot around these things included herself, in her entirety.

During the time her grandchildren were visiting, her last opportunity to have a chance to hear what her grandchildren's voices sound like was once again squandered by ignoring them, while talking about how beautiful they are, to the adults who were old enough to know how to shut up and listen to her.

In the course of everything else, while I was being continually triggered by this maddening behavior, there were many touching moments.

Anne was reminiscing about aspects of her daily life in JP that she said she enjoyed so much, that she would miss.  I'm not sure how much she really enjoyed these things, and how much she was working on developing some kind of daily routine to try to not be too miserable, as she lived alone in Boston.  But she talked about how much she loved her daily trips to Cafe Ula nearby, to sip a latte and read a book, and her walks through the park around the corner where the Tibetan Redwoods are growing, and her trips to hear student recitals at the New England Conservatory a short T ride away.

So once she was no longer able to walk, Bonnie borrowed a wheelchair from somewhere, and we took Anne to have her official last sip of a latte at Cafe Ula, and to have her last walk through the park, and her last concert at Jordan Hall.  Last Tuesday, we wheeled her to the place where she could vote in an election, for the last time.

One of the things Anne talked about that she had never mentioned before related to a relationship she was in with a much older married man when she was in her twenties.  In lieu of being able to tell this long-dead lover of hers that she still loved him, Anne felt moved to contact his children, now in their eighties, like her, to tell them that she still loved their father.  They were so gracious in their response to her, telling her that he still loved her, too.  This was both so touching, and so mind-boggling, at the same time, knowing that this was a woman who to no small degree defined herself as a jilted divorcee, whose husband was stolen by a younger woman with whom he had had an affair.  To learn that she had once been the younger woman having the affair with the married man was downright depressing.  Not that she had an affair with a married man, but that even after having this experience herself, she had no capacity to understand why her own husband had done the same thing she had once done.

I have spent more than two years now watching a livestreamed genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinians, especially in Gaza.  I have been watching people starve to death.  I have seen how long a fragile old person's body, or a fragile child's body, can survive without food.  I have seen picture after picture of what they look like just before death.  There's obviously a giant difference between voluntarily not eating and an enforced famine, but those starving Palestinians were what kept on going through my mind as I watched Anne's body become more emaciated day by day.

Anne's death came on the 26th day after she stopped eating.  And incidentally, the 38th day of the longest government shutdown in US history.

Once she became too weak to speak, there was a peace that fell on her apartment.  Rather than a place where a bunch of people took shifts looking after Anne and listening to her talk, Anne's apartment became a gathering place for friends and family to hang out, while she died.  Her apartment was now a space where other voices could be heard, and many good conversations then took place there.

The occasion of Anne's death, sort of pre-planned as it was, was a wonderful time to see people I hadn't seen in a long time, and to spend more time with folks like my sister and her family, who I so often just see for a night or two and then I'm off somewhere else, on a tour.  This time, I was also on a tour, but I never took the return flight home to Portland.

Anne brought a lot of beautiful music into the world.  Somehow or other she raised a couple of great kids.  She supported all the good causes, along with some of the hopeless ones.  Like most of us, maybe even the vast majority of us, she worked hard and she did her best.

I knew that when she was alive, which is why I didn't want to hurt her by pointing out the ways she did harm to her children, and to so many of her fragile young students, while she was alive.

But at least now that she is no longer with us, I think all of those people, wherever they are, deserve to know that whatever insulting or dismissive comment Anne made to them, it was not deserved.  No one should be treated like that, just because they wanted to learn how to play the piano, or their parents wanted them to.

In what seems like a very intriguing twist of fate, just about one hour after Anne's passing, a Chihuahua was wandering around on the street in front of the house.  She looked lost and cold.  John picked her up and brought her inside.  The dog had no collar or other identification, so someone called the animal shelter to see if there might be a chip in the animal.  The address of the shelter, it turned out, was 26 Mahler.

Mahler was the composer of the last piece of music Anne played, several days before she died, before she was too weak to see or sit up.  It was day 26 of her fast when she died.  The Chihuahua seemed like some kind of parting gift.  Who knows.