It's a strange new world, and it was a strange new world already. If you're on my email list or you follow me on certain platforms, you have a pretty good idea of what I've been up to in it. If you're not an active follower, but only connect with me or my music or writing in various other ways, you may think I've disappeared. For some people this may have happened twenty years ago, for others much more recently, depending.
I'm just going to keep talking about me and what I've been up to, by the way -- very self-absorbed sort of stuff here, be warned. Anyone waiting for me to start making more expansive observations might be disappointed if you keep reading.
Even when not confronted with fascinating new technologies I feel compelled to understand, I'm a bit obsessive about whatever I'm exploring at a given time. When I first discovered open tunings on the guitar, I barely wrote anything in standard tuning after that for literally decades. When I first wrote a song for kids, I spent the next two years writing almost exclusively children's songs. When I first got back into the cello, I barely played any other instrument for years. Same with the mandola, the bouzouki, and lately the cittern. When I decided I wanted to explore interviewing people, during the pandemic, I was often doing two or three or even four hour-long interviews on a typical day. I could go on and on with other examples.
My father has always been like that, too, which is probably where I got this tendency. He's 90 now, and experiencing cognitive decline, but for most of his adult life, and certainly for all the time I lived with him and my mom growing up, when he wasn't off to teach music and composition classes at Long Island University, he'd get up early in the morning and go downstairs to his piano in our fairly dank, dark basement in Wilton, Connecticut, to compose.
He is a fabulous pianist, and these days he'll often play Debussy or Chopin or other classical composers, for the joy of playing music. The condo where he lives now with his wife, Christina (with whom he has made many beautiful recordings that you can find on the usual streaming platforms), is often full of the sounds of live music.
But when I was growing up, listening to what was going on in the basement there when Howard was doing his thing, the sound you heard was mostly silence, interrupted by the occasional series of notes played on the piano, and Howard humming musical phrases now and then, and then more silence, along with the scratching sounds of a pencil adding notes to a score he had in front of him.
As soon as the personal computer came around, by around 1979, Howard got one, and as soon as someone started making software for composition, like the musical equivalent of word processing, Howard was an early adopter. It wasn't long before you'd hear a lot less pencil-scratching on scores, and a lot more tapping on a computer keyboard. What he was doing with the computer was basically the same thing he had been doing with a pencil and paper, but so many aspects of the process were now massively expedited. Anyone who has gone from using typewriters to using word processors will understand.
Musicians are often early adopters of all kinds of technology. I learned how to splice reel-to-reel tape as a toddler, because my dad composed with reel-to-reel tape as well. (This was prior to the existence of cassette tapes.) On a related note, when IBM was initially looking to train people how to do computer programming/coding, the focus of their recruitment efforts were at the music conservatories, since the folks at IBM had figured out that the people in society who were best at learning new things of the sort IBM folks were interested in were the musicians.
Anyone who has been to a recording studio sometime in the past thirty years can likely also testify to the technological savvy of the people running and working in the studio. The most expensive electronic toys I have regularly encountered in life have mostly been in recording studios. The fanciest stuff I ever see happening on a computer screen have been in recording studios. The people I know, of any age, who are most adept at technology and most in need of the greatest amounts of RAM and ROM and all that other stuff, are running or working in recording studios.
Since the 1990's, for a long time on a roughly annual basis, I would manage to spend somewhere between a few days to a couple weeks in a recording studio with a skilled producer, engineer, and a bunch of hard-working musicians -- generally musicians with a lot of experience doing just this sort of thing, the sort who get referred to as excellent session musicians, adept at doing what is asked of them by a producer or an artist like me (co-producer, usually).
Along with those session musicians so skilled at playing so many different styles of music with perfect timing and execution, the studio engineers have long possessed abilities that most of the world had no idea about. Decades before we were commonly talking about technology that we now tend to refer to by the blanket term "AI," engineers in music studios were commonly doing things like digitally changing the pitches of a voice or an instrument after making a recording with them, to fix any intonation issues, and doing things like digitally and with increasingly automated efficiency fixing timing issues with the same kind of technology.
For all the mostly manufactured, rags-to-riches stories you'll hear from promoters and record label executives about their artists, in actual reality, making recordings with the kind of production values and sound quality you hear on commercial radio is very time-consuming and very expensive. It's not about one very talented artist or magic -- it's about a lot of very talented artists, very talented engineers, very talented producers, and a lot of technology, a lot of time, and a lot of money.
By my observation, anytime a new technology comes around related to music, it's widely adopted and broadly vilified. There are often devastating downsides to the technology, but its popularity is a consequence of its usefulness combined with the inevitability of using what everyone else is using. Although it's generally not artists who invent or promote any of the new technologies, it's the artists who tend to get the lion's share of the vilification for using them.
A lot of artists worked in the vaudeville circuit, which, for half a century or so across the US and Canada, involved thousands of theaters, tens of thousands of performers of all kinds, and millions of audience members each week altogether. The last vaudeville theater was converted full-time to a movie theater in 1932. Most of the vaudeville performers who managed to keep working after the death of vaudeville found roles in the new radio, movie, and television industries.
Many people deeply lamented the passing of the vaudeville era, but it was so much less expensive for theater owners to play a movie than to pay for all those live performers. For hardworking, time-pressed former vaudeville audience members, the temptation of sitting at home in front of a TV or radio was too much. It was, after all, free, despite all the drawbacks in terms of sound and picture quality, and the isolation inherent in watching TV at home, likely in a nuclear family setting, rather than in a broader community environment. Soon enough, the alternative of that kind of live entertainment no longer existed in the way it had been known before.
The temptation to use AI today is similar to the temptation for a vaudeville artist to work in radio or TV in the 1920's. Soon enough, it won't be a matter of choice for whatever remains of working artists, and the period when it was controversial will seem as anachronistic as dreaming of the days of vaudeville does today. From my vantage point as an artist with my feet in both worlds, this is an entirely obvious statement. Not sure what all my readers might think.
Because of the intentional ways in which the music industry has successfully sought to mystify everything related to culture, most people have no idea what goes on "behind the curtain," to borrow from the very relevant Wizard of Oz.
When multi-track recording technology was developed in the mid twentieth century it quickly became popular in the studios. No longer was it necessary to have the whole band playing live together. Multi-tracking was more economical that way, and it also added all kinds of irresistible possibilities in terms of layering more and different sorts of sounds.
For those people especially passionate about the idea of live performance and live, physical community, the move from vaudeville to TV was devastating. Similarly, if only among the small minority of the population involved with making recordings in recording studios, the shift from live takes to multi-tracking. But as it was ultimately possible to make much better-sounding recordings with multi-tracking, and also to have a basically infinite number of musicians in the band, the power engineers and producers could now have to shape the music they were making was amazing.
There are always exceptions to the rule, individuals with tremendous skill in so many different areas involved with the whole process of writing, composing, arranging, and recording, who are also brilliant sound engineers and multi-instrumentalists, who can work wonders in a little home studio. But generally, making the kinds of recordings we're familiar with from listening to commercial radio -- recordings with such high production values -- was very expensive. I have never spent more than $12,000 on making an album, back in the days of CD sales, before coming up with such sums to record albums became a thing of fantasy for me. But making the kinds of recordings you hear on commercial radio would generally have required a budget four times larger than my biggest budget ever.
Every one of those recording experiences was a different shade of amazing. Being in a studio with a bunch of brilliant artists of different sorts, having the privilege to work with them at coming up with something together that would inevitably be much more interesting than anything I'd be able to do without their involvement, it's magical.
Those experiences in the studio especially would bring me back to Howard, my dad, working in his basement. As a composer, he could imagine all these different parts, and simulate them on the piano to see what they would sound like. He'd imagine the sounds of the different instruments, long before he ever had a chance to assemble a bunch of musicians to see what his music might actually be like when properly rendered, with the instrumentation he had in mind. Oftentimes he'd never have this opportunity.
Not being one who can imagine the different sounds of an orchestra and write a score for many different instruments to play together like my dad did most mornings, for me the closest thing to this experience was being in a music studio with a bunch of musicians and engineers, co-producing one of my albums. I wasn't writing any scores, but I could tell them what I was imagining might work, and hear it back pretty much right then, to see if it worked as I imagined. Then I or someone else would throw out another idea, how to tweak whatever aspect of the music we were working on, and we'd see how that sounded.
I know I'm far from the only artist in the world who thrived so much on these rare and expensive experiences in recording studios like that, who could never get nearly enough of it. I'm far from the only artist who envied those with far more resources, who could spent months out of a given year working with musicians in studios, rather than a few days.
The fantasy, for me and lots of others, is to be in the position of those very few, extremely successful musicians who can just spend most of their time living in a music studio, with recording engineers, producers, and a diverse array of amazing studio musicians at their beck and call 24/7.
Until very recently, this was a fantasy for me, and for the vast majority of other fantasizing musicians. Nowadays, however, I'm basically living in a music studio 24/7 with some of the most amazing musicians I've ever heard at my beck and call, along with sound engineers that consistently make them sound as good as anyone ever recorded, and they work as fast as I can write lyrics. Really they work much faster, but for practical purposes, as fast, since they need the lyrics to work with first.
I haven't played much with getting the AI to write lyrics, because I find I always do a consistently far better job of it. AI has a long way to go before it can write well, which would seem to make sense, since most human artists write very formulaic lyrics, and that's what the AI presumably has to train on. But the AI sure has got the music down cold.
The proof, as usual, is in the pudding.
I've been writing songs long enough now that I know how to write a song that is going to make someone cry. That is, if I'm writing a song that is basically a really sad story set to music, I can tell when it's done, when it's arrived at the kind of state where I know when the right kind of audience in the right kind of listening room atmosphere hears the song, there will be tears and sniffles emanating from elements of the audience by the end of it.
By the same token, because I know what I'm doing, I can apply the same skills to working with the AI band that I apply to working on my own or with a human band. I know when the song is done, and is going to have that kind of impact on listeners. And sure enough, when I play those songs to people in the right circumstances, it has the impact I expected.
The evidence of the songs being effective can also be found in the feedback. In the past month, between Facebook and Instagram these songs have been heard more than a million times, shared tens of thousands of times, and they have elicited thousands of comments. Of course there are the usual Hasbara trolls saying the usual stuff, but the other 80-90% of the comments are real people, and they are overwhelmingly full of praise, of the sort that indicates that the sad songs are, in fact, tear-jerkers, and the anthemic songs do, in fact, inspire people to keep up the fight.
Over time I began taking the songs more seriously, and experimenting with ways to get them heard more broadly. Generating slideshow-style, portrait-framed videos with an AI music video generating platform and then adding a title and captions has been the ticket. Since I started putting them out in that form, uploading them directly to the various social media platforms (not just sharing links, which is generally pointless), the response has grown exponentially.
Being able to put out these songs and get such response from them has intensified the obsession I was already experiencing. These songs I've been writing with Suno are some of the best songs I've ever heard, to risk sounding like a hopeless narcissist. There is no compromise involved with the process of working with an AI band, from a musical standpoint. There are all kinds of other issues, as there are with all kinds of other new technologies, but artistically, this stuff is amazing. And the prospect of being able to provide real-time musical commentary about what's happening in the world, with these kinds of production values along with a video, even if the videos themselves aren't amazing, the overall result is millions of views -- far beyond anything I was getting before.
The critics of what I'm doing with this are few compared to those with the praise, but I know many of the critics are coming from a place of caring for the future of humanity, the environment, and the welfare of musicians. But I think they're generally engaged in black and white thinking. If they are concerned about humanity, the environment, etc., then clearly what we need to do is win the hearts and minds of as many people as possible to the cause. If anyone has another way to do this more effectively than I am doing it that doesn't involve spending vast sums of nonexistent money, please let me know.
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