About This Album
Echoes Of Unmade Miles was a project that came about in mid-2025 when I discovered the beast/spectre (delete as appropriate) called Generative AI. I had, as you now know, over 20 sets of lyrics that were written in a really generous purple patch between 2015 and 2017 when I was still learning and evolving as a writer and I would be able to find motivation and subject matter in pretty much anything, whether it be a TV movie, a cinema film, a soap opera, misheard words in another song, anything. There was an awful lot of Stream-Of-Conscience writing during that period and it generated a lot of lyrics, as I married these prompts, these catalysts up to where I was as a man and a musician and as a writer at the time. I was very much finding my way out of a dark period in my life and learning to heal and apply the lessons of what I had learned through bitter experience, before I moved from Wiltshire back to the county of my birth, Warwickshire. Many books, many prompts, many trips, many philosophies were examined and undertaken and tried before I settled on the path that I am now contentedly walking along.
Now, the vast majority of them were made available to my usual collaborators at the time, but no one chose to do anything with them with two exceptions; David J Barnes chose to take on and interpret Come Home Soon and Love Me Or Leave Me Alone in his own way and they were both very different to how I saw them to be. Not that I was unhappy about that, LOLZ. I was and always will be delighted when someone is moved enough by what I write to interpret them in their own way, its one of the highest compliments that I can be paid.
So, ultimately, I was left with over 20 sets of lyrics that sat in an A4 ring binder for a decade which did nothing. There was however, in 2024/2025 a lot of noise emerging about Generative AI and I hadnt really paid it any attention up to this point at all. So, for reasons that I dont really understand and definitely will never question, in 2025 I decided to take a look at a platform called Suno and flung a couple of sets of lyrics at it to see what could be done. I had a very rough idea as to how I wanted the songs to sound but no real concrete plan as to what the songs were meant to sound like. First ones thrown into the mix were Come Home Soon, Dont Talk About It and Once Was Promising. Buoyed by the positives that I took from those versions which I never had any real musical ideas for, I took the plunge for a Pro membership and threw a lot of other works at it and learned how to drive the prompts to create something that I would be happy with.
So, the Echoes album was originally going to be a mass collection of part-AI generated works that were just going to be purely AI versions. My lyrics wedded to Suno generated performances and melodies. This, as I found, was proving to be particularly challenging to publicise and particularly to monetise, because of the attitudes around music that is either partly or wholly generated through AI and particularly platforms like Suno. Since then, the concept has evolved and there will be a number of changes to that concept; the idea now is very much to use the tracks that have been generated already that I am happy with as demos to use as a basis for new tracks that will be recorded as much as possible by me using the non-AI DAW technologies that I am most familiar with; I will still need to use AI technologies for some aspects, particularly female vocals which I cannot obviously provide and they will either be Suno or Re-Sing generated. The aim is to do as much of the musical heavy lifting as I can. Some of the songs that were previously on earlier works that I thought that I could have done better or, more accurately, I had imagined being sung by better vocalists than I could ever be, or with different arrangements that I couldnt recreate with what I knew at the time the originals were recorded – and I’m thinking specifically of Stars, Stay, Five Years, Love Me Or Leave Me Alone, Birds & Butterflies and a couple of others – will most likely be revisited and re-examined.
As before, with Time Demands, this album’s artwork is almost entirely generated by Grok. One picture taken by a real human is also part of the concept but the two main ones are AI generated. Thematically, it is correct, given that the majority of the works are part AI composed. Also, conceptually, it shows me or an AI representation of me walking down an unspecified New York street, carrying a guitar hard case, in both rear and front views.
There are two other pictures, a real one of the very large steel globe at the 1964 World Fair site at Flushing in New York where my biological parents met (and is therefore pivotal to my whole life – had they not met at that point, I wouldn’t be here, and is a site I still need to visit, to take in the energy of the place while these historical artefacts still exist) and another Grok sourced one of the representation of me walking through the rain towards the site, carrying a suitcase and a guitar case. The significance of the guitar is obviously around my father’s history as a professional guitarist and how that has influenced my life choices and me walking towards this particular historical artefact reflects that it is still a personal quest, something that I still have to do, a bucket list thing, to go back to the start, while I still can.
Makes total sense to me, LOLZ.
The work is not yet underway, beyond the initial songs being “Suno-fied” and being held as stems and wav files in a hard drive somewhere; there are two other works in the roadmap in front of this particular album that need to be completed before I deal with this one; at the time of writing, there is both the completion of Time Demands and the Chasing A Rainbow Original Soundtrack that need to be addressed before anything else and it may also be that Sagittarious Rising may also take priority over Echoes. That decision as to whether Sag Rising will precede it is yet to be taken.
