New is inevitably mediocre—because it hasn’t had the luxury of being filtered through what might be the most effective quality control mechanism we all have access to: time.
If you haven’t seen the top 100 movies of the last 50 years, spend your time watching those—not the top 100 movies of last year. The same goes for albums. The same goes for books.
Your art will be infinitely better if you allow what has proved to be great to influence your work, rather than the latest ‘thing’ that businesses and corporations are pushing for their own benefit.
I hope that one day technology advances to the point where a songwriter can simply plug in a microphone and guitar, sing their heart out, and create a commercially viable master recording. I don’t want anyone to lose their jobs, but imagine a world where a writer can focus purely on the music — without needing a mixing or mastering engineer, without thousands of dollars in equipment, and without spending thousands of hours trying to understand things like RMS. That would be a wonderful thing.
Working really hard to complete lyrics to around 20 songs at the moment. I often find lyric writing the hardest part of songwriting, but it’s an amazing feeling when a line finally slots into place. Some come quickly, but I often get stuck for days on one line.
When that happens I’m tempted to move on to another song, but I find it more effective when I take a complete break from writing and do something else.
Persistence is everything.
Here are the lyrics to one song that may or may not feature on the next album:
When you produce music, you should work like a chef.
From a chef’s perspective, the most fundamental element is high-quality ingredients. For the musician, these are everything you write and record: your vocal lines, bass parts, drum tracks, and so on. They need to be as fresh as possible. If something is clearly wrong, get rid of it. If it’s just average, replace it. Aim for quality. Re-record lacklustre parts. Scrap weak lyrics. Settle only for the best.
Once you’ve got great ingredients, make sure you don’t undercook or overcook them. A few choice elements are better than throwing everything into the mix. But don’t be afraid to add that one surprising (maybe even weird) thing that brings it all together or makes it more interesting. Balance is everything.
Then comes the seasoning. Plugins are like seasoning. And in the long run, who really benefits from low-quality food overloaded with salt and spice? The best chefs use seasoning skilfully but creatively. Sometimes a little too much is okay. Too little, and it lacks flavour. So get creative with reverb and compression—but know when enough is enough.
Not everyone is aiming to make Michelin Star music—but in recent years, the industry and the internet have become glutted with fast food music. Use this to your advantage. Quality, skill, craft, and integrity will stand out—if not immediately, then over time.
Excuse the meat-related analogy, but when you listen to a song on streaming services or elsewhere, it’s important to remember that you did not see how the sausage was made. You are not hearing the songwriter’s multiple poorly recorded voice notes or all the wonky demos that did not make the cut.
More often than not, this is the pristine, glamour version that has been honed and re-recorded several times, featuring comped vocals. It also benefits from the skills of an engineer using expensive plugins or outboard gear to massage the tracks and the output, as well as the work of a mastering engineer who has sprinkled the mixdown with his own brand of musical MSG.
Using this method, an average song can sound pretty good. But you are not aiming for average in the long run (although don’t be afraid to write average songs on your search for the good stuff).
The lesson is: don’t try to sound shiny at the writing stage. Concentrate purely on the quality of the arrangement, lyrics, melody, texture, feel, emotion, etc. Knock the song into shape without worrying about how it will sound on Spotify. Song first, production later.
Eventually, you will play your shiny master to someone, and they will have no knowledge of the toil that went on behind the scenes. But you will.
The reason I ask is that I recently heard a songwriter suggest that it isn’t. He argued that because ideas—particularly good ones—often appear randomly, songwriting isn’t a craft. A craft, he said, implies something more deliberate and considered.
He has a point. Idea generation is unpredictable and chaotic. But it takes a huge number of bad ideas to find the good ones—and a lot of good ones to find the great ones. Sifting through them involves an element of craft.
But the real work, which I’d call craftsmanship, begins once you’ve selected the ideas you want to complete. Only through steely patience, persistence, and even a little pain can you bring the embryo of a great song to life and nurture it into something fully formed—something that can literally outlive you.
Inevitably, there will always be an elusive final line, word, melody, or chord change that refuses to reveal itself. You have to graft and graft until it does.
Recently, I came across a book used in the design world called Problem Seeking. I love the concept. We always think in terms of problem-solving but seldom look for problems. I thought this could be helpful when writing songs.
Look for and expect problems. Overcoming them is how you grow, and finishing something worth sharing always requires persistence.
Don’t be daunted. This is a natural part of the creative process. Be a craftsman. Persist. Keep working. Keep learning. Push through.
That’s when you’ll experience the payoff of completing a song—one that brings a deeper satisfaction than the fleeting elation of a new idea.
This is an interesting interview with Bryan Ferry. I don’t know much about Roxy Music, (although I’m a big Eno fan) but it made me want to listen to more.
He said two things that stood out to me. One was that when you create things you’re trying to make something better than yourself. That applies well to most art forms.
Toward the end of the interview he was asked if he has any new recordings coming up. He said he still only feels like he’s learning the trade. He’s 79.
That’s a good attitude. If you think you are already a guru, you’ll stop progressing.
So far, my feeling about AI is that, beyond its usefulness as a search engine, it’s only helpful for the last one percent of most creative work.
Let’s say you’ve written your lyrics (or article, or speech etc.). All the ideas, research, content, and phrasing come from your own brain. Then, you feed it into an AI tool of your choice, and it corrects your grammar or highlights awkward logic and inconsistencies.
AI is amazing at this final stage. It can catch and polish things like only a robot can.
But in my opinion (so far), the “artificial” nature of its “intelligence” becomes very evident when trying to create art.
A little experiment to demonstrate
I once wrote a song called Utopia that ended up on my last album Healer. You can listen to it here:
I started the song while living in southern China, in a factory town called Humen. Most of the inhabitants were migrant factory workers. It was an atmospheric place with a lot of history, but the pollution from the surrounding factories was chronic, and the workers didn’t look happy to me. This inspired the feel of the song and the lyrics.
I wanted to paint a picture of people trying to— or pretending to—be happy (“this is our Utopia“) while living in a pretty soul-destroying environment.
The final lyrics took a long time to write and included references to this art exhibition: Whose Utopia?. I also mention a burning motorcycle I saw in the middle of an intersection during a morning run. The coda at the end references laughing gas canisters strewn across a park in an affluent part of Manchester, where I stayed during COVID.
Here are the full lyrics:
Utopia
Oh what a pretty skyline
Fog and pollution
People lining up for execution
Silent ballerina
Dances through a factory
Lighting up the workers and machinery
This is our Utopia
This is our Utopia
Don’t shatter the illusion
This ignorance is opium
Oh how can the morning
Sky look suicidal
High above a burning motorcycle
And lonely out-of-towners
Carrion for vultures
Biting on the hand that never feeds us
This is our Utopia
This is our Utopia
Don’t shatter the illusion
‘Cause this ignorance is opium
Don’t shatter the illusion
‘Cause this ignorance is opium
There’s laughing gas
On the summer grass
This is our Utopia
The question is: Could AI have written these lyrics or something that I consider of similar quality?
Let’s see:
Here’s the result:
Utopia (Chat GPT version)
Neon hum on the factory floor, midnight shifts and metal doors. Machines sing their static tune, under an artificial moon.
And the faces glow in flickering light, dreams wrapped up in cellophane tight. Is this paradise? Is this a dream? Or just a town caught in the machine?
Utopia—painted in smoke and steel, we laugh like ghosts so the world won’t feel. We chase the sun that never sets, inside a dream we can’t forget.
Plastic gardens, concrete skies, we build the world with tired eyes. One more stitch, one more spark, one more light against the dark.
And the radio plays a hollow tune, echoes bounce in an empty room. Is this paradise? Is this a dream? Or just a town caught in the machine?
Utopia—painted in smoke and steel, we laugh like ghosts so the world won’t feel. We chase the sun that never sets, inside a dream we can’t forget.
Outside the walls, the stars still burn, but we’re too tired to lift our heads and turn. So we dance in circuits, loop and rewind, finding joy in the factory grind.
Neon hum on the factory floor, midnight shifts and metal doors. Maybe someday we’ll break free, or maybe this is all we need.
Well, they aren’t exactly terrible.
But of course, it’s the melding of the lyrics with the melody and chords that makes the song.
I played with Utopia’s chords—particularly the chorus—for years before I got it right.
But let’s see what AI comes up with. This is the version created solely with AI using Suno.com. It uses the Chat GPT lyrics above:
And this is the version also with Suno.com that uses my lyrics:
I think the results speak for themselves, but that’s just my opinion.
Finally, what about album artwork?
This song was originally going to be on my previous album, Underground Man. My artist friend Johnnie created the album artwork.
The “prompt” I gave him was:
A psychedelic scene based on the Shanghai skyline, with pollution oozing into the river in unusual colours.
And this is what he sent me:
Which became this:
But what will AI come up with?
This time let’s ask Copilot for help using the same prompt:
It’s pretty cool. But very AI.
So what do you think? Should I have used AI to create my music and artwork?
My most-streamed composition so far was written in the Nicaraguan mountains. In 2018, I lived in a town called Diriamba. We stayed on the second floor of a large house in town. The weather was sultry, and the noise of funeral processions, bar fights, farmers on horseback, and the crowing of a giant mechanical cockerel—an evil mascot for a chicken restaurant, blaring even at 5 a.m.—poured into the room.
I wrote two pieces there: Olvidar, which started on electric guitar, and a long ambient piece designed to help my wife sleep, which eventually became Silent Vapour Trail. Both tracks appear on one of my “travel” albums, Connections.
Now, Silent Vapour Trail has only had a modest number of listens across platforms, but I once uploaded it to SoundCloud under the name Relaxing Music to Help You Fall Asleep. It’s now had over 4,000 listens—which is a lot for the non–Justin Biebers of the world, like myself.
That must be down to the name—it promises something useful. But the thing is, the music does help my wife and me sleep. Life was stressful before we arrived in Nicaragua, so I deliberately wrote a long, meditative piece to help us (and anyone else) chill out.
Still, it makes me wonder—what if all my songs had titles that promised something? Love Song to Make You Feel Romantic, Upbeat Tune to Get You on the Dance Floor, Thoughtful Folk Song…
Maybe that would help listeners who don’t know or care about my music. But it wouldn’t feel honest. I called it Silent Vapour Trail because it sounded poetic, it suited my mood at the time, and I could see airplanes drifting across the pink Nicaraguan evening sky as I wrote it.
Then again, maybe none of that matters. Somewhere out there, a tired soul has drifted off to sleep listening to whatever this piece is called, blissfully unaware of the song’s origin—or its writer.
