Updates

Only You And I Know…

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“Whenever I think I know you better
Better than I know myself
Ooh, I open up and give you everything
Then you say, “Okay, what else?”
And when I run away, you always cry
You always overreact
But I don’t know if you know how you really feel
But you better know before I get back…”

© Collins/Stuermer, from the album “No Jacket Required”, 1985

Well, this one just walked in pretty much fully formed and was gestated from some spare lines that I figured that I wanted to use that had managed to avoid the sift so far. There were a few things that prompted it really, some of it from seeing a couple of very old (well, nearly 40 years old now) videos on YouTube, one of them being REM’s Everybody Hurts, with some of the lines being inspired by some of the subtitles in the video. It is one of the most devastating videos I’ve ever seen and one of only three that I have ever seen where I have got what the video director was trying to say immediately. The main other one being Alanis Morissette‘s ThankU, but there are others.

Anyway. Before I start diversifying too much, this one has kinda crept in quite late and so long as the music manages to meet the spec, should be able to see its way on to Time Demands, probably smack bang in the middle of the listing. I have been giving some thought to how the album should run, but I’ll come to that in future updates.

The subject matter is one that was prompted by a line in a song now that I cant even remember – where the premis is that a writer’s songs are full of pointers and what are effectively open secrets about the person that they’re written about. I mean, Patti Boyd can write an encyclopaedia on the ones that have been written about her by Eric Clapton, Wayne Hussey has had a few as well from Children and Gods Own Medicine that were about the same particular muse, the mother of his daughter… Jimmy Webb most famously did, most eloquently and uniquely with McArthur Park as well… and where Steve Hogarth is concerned, fuggedaboutit….. Neverland, Somewhere Else, Games In Germany… his muses whether they be women that he has been close to, like his first wife or a good friend of his from his childhood in Doncaster who joined the army, are never far from the surface.

And I guess as well, going back over the three albums I’ve been writing, I’ve not hidden where the muses have inspired me either. And I guess, this song is a way of saying, if you hear this song and listen to it carefully, you’ll recognise bits of us in it, secrets that only you and I will be aware of. Everyone else will sing along but will be completely oblivious… The first verse referring to close time together where a couple will recognise intimate moments by a seashore and the second verse descends to tongue in cheek wordplay, where it refers to a suitcase full of the wrong clothes and straws to break a camels back, because its the only thing he knows how to do, is to push her to her limits.

There are some slightly odd lines in there. No more arguing in the house of God, funnily enough came from a Steve Hogarth Christmas gig in Oxford in 2021 when he had to tell someone to wind her neck in as she was prattling away when he was trying to speak to the audience, which I know he tries not to do…Tell the shivers to subside was heard in a film, dont ask me which one though, but I thought that is brilliant, I’m having that... stream the songs of the angels through the blandness… well, that one is pretty self explanatory really. Given how much bland noise there is these days out there on the likes of Spotify and others, when we hear what are the sounds of angels, or great songs that we love like diamonds amongst the coal, we should sing them louder to make sure everyone hears them.

Music-wise, all up in the air at the moment, although something is telling me Tears For Fears “Seeds Of Love” era… trying to have polished high production values, but its almost like there is bits of Neil Finn-isms in there as well, like Locked Out from Together Alone. I guess if I can pitch a metaphorical lyrical tent somewhere between Neil Finn and Roland Orzabal, I should be happy.

Lets see how it turns out… I’m in the process of building all the songs at the moment and it is likely to take some time to bring these things into a recognisable state but things are quite promising at present…

Only You And I Know…

Verse 1
My songs all contain secrets about you In every line,
the look in your eye or the warmth of your hand
The sea between your toes, barefoot in the sand
 
Chorus
And only you and I know, the truth in the songs and the lines
A seed of love sown with tears, flowers in the spring with joy
And only you and I know, You’ll hear your name in this song all the time
Only you and I know what it is all about, theres no reason for us to be so coy
 
Verse 2
My heart’s been dragged around like a suitcase
Filled with all the wrong clothes
Its full of the straws to break your camel’s back
In the only way that I know (and how..)…
 
Chorus
And only you and I know, the truth in the songs and the lines
A seed of love sown with tears, flowers in the spring with joy
And only you and I know, You’ll hear your name in this song all the time
Only you and I know what it is all about, theres no reason for us to be so coy
 
Middle 8:
No more arguing in the house of god,
No more seeking the truth in wine
An unfinished jigsaw on the kitchen table
Shouldnt be the story of our lives
Tell those shivers to subside,
Scream out loud to be let in from the cold
Stream the songs of angels through the sea of the blandness
Did we really say goodbye thinking we’d never get old?
Chorus x 2 to fade

© Music and Lyrics, Steve McCarthy-Hunt 2025

Parallel Lives

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“Passion or coincidence once prompted you to say
“Pride will tear us both apart”
Well, now pride’s gone out the window
‘Cross the rooftops, run away
Left me in the vacuum of my heart

What is happening to me?
Crazy, some’d say
Where is my friend when I need you most?“

© Taylor/Rhodes/Le Bon/Cucurillo, 1993 from “Duran Duran” (aka The Wedding Album)

Well, this is the first of the songs that are in the process of composition for the future album Time Demands. And, while a lot of other writers would be sensible and wait for the finished product before writing about it and recording it for posterity….. nope, thats not my modus operandi. I’m particularly keen to deliver Added Value, my dear followers… you get to find out about the stuff while its gestating, as it is building, while it makes its journey from first draft (like this one) to finished track. None of that corporate flim-flam here. Nooooo….

… and then, when I should come back later and edit it and say “well, it started out like this, but ended up way over here somewhere instead…”… yeah, that bit sometimes/most often falls under the table and doesnt get done.

But here we are and I’m not really going to break the habit of a lifetime just yet.

So…… Parallel Lives, then. This was put together as an important part of the album and is largely self explanatory. It is about my best friend and I and how he has been part of my life for the best part of 30+ years and how I would not be the man that I am without his influence and his friendship. Some may think it is too autobiographical and I have to admit, I havent spoken to him about it and whether he is happy about me being as candid as I am in these lyrics. And some may say, more than a little raw. I guess that will find its own level during the track’s gestation period. I suspect, conversely that one track that he has written which I had produced and played on back in 2012 may have been about me as it sure as heck lines up with a lot of my life events of the time during my first marriage, but then again a) I never asked him about it and b) if you look long and hard enough at any song you can read any meaning into any of it… viz the comment by James Grant about the middle 8 in Jocelyn Square from the “Strange Kind Of Love” album….

“All the memories that flower and blossom in this pale endymion hour, they paint a picture of you, too good to be true”...

when I first read that I was thinking “jeez, how can I compete with that… endymion … wtf does that mean?… Oh thats what it means? The sleep of the dead…. so while he’s sleeping the sleep of the dead, his mind is creating this image of her thats too good to be true… bloody hell, thats brilliant”. There is no way I will ever be worthy, etc etc... and James himself later said “oh that, yeah I saw it in a book and thought ‘that looks good, I’m having that’ and dropped it in. Dont ask me what it means, I dont know”. Talk about crushed,, LOLZ.

So, in a roundabout way, I may have got off on completely the wrong foot, but having said that, what I say within the song is true, there is very little artistic licence and it is an honest and open paean to the man who has been, for most of my adult life, my best friend. It is absolutely true that if I had been posted into the military unit that I was sent to in 1992 on any other day, if he and I and another member of his band hadnt crossed paths on the day we did, every single day of the following 35 years would have taken a very different turn and I would absolutely not be the man, the writer, the lyricist, the producer, that I am now. My whole adult life from the age of 27 turned on that moment.

Parallel Lives tells that story. Much as we have a friendship that I hope will never be broken, much as real life has demanded our day to day attention for as long as it has, much as he is finding music not to be the comfort that I found it to be when I was in a darker place… that bond is one that I will be forever grateful for and will treasure and I hope he finds his way back into the light when he is ready. Obviously, it only focuses on parts of our lives, its not warts and all, but its about what has bound us in its own way.

And, as per the caveat in an earlier paragraph, it is a first draft and it is subject to change.

Parallel Lives

I dont know if I was your best friend
But for so many years, you have been mine
I didnt really need to know, our parallel lives just used to flow
The most precious thing we gave each other was our time

I took your songs and believed in you
More for your good than mine
Onwards we walked, down that same long road
Side by Side, always Side by Side

And we’d share a stage, night after night we’d play
Searching for our place in the big time
Night after night, music under lights
Smoke in our eyes, our art demanded our sacrifice
When all our hearts really craved was real life
It all got left a little further behind.

I thought I had found love three times
In the time it took you to find the one in your life
And you stood by my side in my darkest hour
On the last day I ever saw my wife
We shared some unforgettable times
Where our music sealed its mark on our lives
And we stood by each others sides

And after thirty years, even though you loved her like no other
She wanted more than you said you could give
I was too many hour behind, I couldnt be anywhere but online
But you knew I’d still give you all of my time

Thank you for the you that once appeared
My life would not be the same after all these years
You gave me someone to sing to through the thunder and the rain
Somebody to lean on through the thunder and flame

We’re only human, we’re all made of mistakes
In a broken world of broken people
The most precious thing is our time
The most precious thing is our time.

© Lyrics by Steve McCarthy-Hunt 2025

The Next Chapter

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Pretty much a month has passed since my last update and things are indeed moving forward. While Mondegreen is no more, the projects that I referred to in my last update are indeed starting to roll forward.

The Echo Of Unmade Miles is, in its rawest form already out there on Bandcamp, but is going to be reviewed, re-recorded and I have decided to add my own value to it as opposed to it being entirely Suno-based, relying only on my lyric writing as my contribution.

The tracks that are going to be used on the album are: Every Time I See Her; All I Needed Was You; Introspection; Deep Deep Blue; Epitaph; Strange Girl; Touch; Unspoken Words; All That You Wanted; Song For Jayne; Burning Bridges and lastly Love Me Or Leave Me Alone. 12 songs. I was originally thinking of making it a double album but in all honesty, I think these 12 are the strongest at the moment and while Suno has done an exceptional job and taking them from raw lyrics to viable songs that I actually like listening to (objectively at that), there are some things about it which are not quite right and need something else.

Whether it be a change to a vocal, or whether its the somewhat easily identifiable (some might say predictable) FM friendly US guitar tone, as if every single guitarist is either Willie Nelson, or an 80’s hair metal pointy headstocked speed demon plugged into a mountain of Mesa Engineering 4 x 12’s… not exactly the kind of tone I had in mind, so I have taken the liberty of taking a range of stems from the (I nearly said recordings, but managed to stop myself!) Suno generated tracks and use them as a demo basis and overdub them as best I can.

The intention will obviously be to use the full range of vst tools that I have available to me which also in the now installed Cubase 15, a Yamaha provided AI voice generation engine but also a long awaited IK Multimedia tool called Re-Sing, which can generate a number of different male or female vocal perfomers, based on what it has “ethically” trained its product on **Tangential digression coming up** (yeah, ok whatever. How the music business, with its track record can sit there with a straight face, howling about “ethics” when they’re even less ethical than modern day politics or medicine is beyond laughable).

But I digress. It is a legit tool, which is locally installed and allows me to be able to at least provide/generate vocals of the correct gender for the tracks I have without relying on Suno’s product. It is being received quite positively by the industry at the moment and I dare say that anyone who listens to music may start to recognise some of the preset voices, in the same way that it was possible in the late 1980s to spot the Yamaha DX7 bass sound, the Roland D50 Fantasia preset, the Korg M1 piano sounds and the famously described “asthmatic sheep being kicked in the guts” Simmons SDS series drums of the time a mile off. Obviously, it would be preferable to make the sounds less… predictable.

For all my talents, one of them that is conspicuous by its absence is the ability to sound like a woman when I sing. I’m not Roland Orzabal, with his legendary falsetto and head voice, borne of years of opera training before forming his band. Some of these songs do sound very good being performed with a female voice (All That You Wanted, All I Needed Was You and the two big cinematic epics, Song For Jayne and Epitaph) and I will endeavour to deliver them with the best vocal that I can, especially given that I do not have the financial depth or contacts to be able to find and retain sessioners to the same standard that will be required. Some may not like it and will grumble very loudly about how AI of any flavour is akin to medieval heresy, calling for anyone who may use it or worse still, provide the service for users, to be treated like witches to be burned at the stake. I dont buy into that hysterical wailing which, lets face it, is seen whenever there is a technological leap in the industry, whether it be multitrack tape, ProTools, Synthesisers, the Fairlight, the LinnDrum, et al. I find it extremely tiresome. It is a tool of the ages and at my time of life and given that all of these songs sat in a folder for a decade doing nothing, I have no concerns whatsoever about using the technology available to me to make these songs every bit as I could be. Given the recent additions of Cubase 15 and the Mac Studio M1 Ultra, I’m probably in the best place I’ve been in order to produce these works.

So the current stage of development that Echo Of Unmade Miles is at; the stems have been downloaded, the Cubase projects have been opened in their templates and I’m hoping to make a start on selecting the stems and working out what is going to be kept and what is going to be re-recorded or enhanced over the coming two months or so. There is already a cover that I’m happy with and barring minor amendments, it’ll be pretty much ready to go when it is complete, which I hope will be in the spring sometime, depending on how much use I make of studio time over the winter, what with being retired now from the daily grind…

Time Demands on the other hand… well, I had been scouring my journals and notebooks for some time for lyrical ideas; there hadnt really been anything that was a leftover from a previous project that didnt make the cut, it was having to be freshly written and constructed. That was also the right thing to do thematically as well, because as I’ve alluded to, the point/theme behind Time Demands is one that has only really become clear in the last 6 months or so; the theme is that of age and the wisdom that is meant to come with it and as we enter our autumn years, what we are going to do with all this stuff that we’ve learned and crammed our minds with and how we’ve got to this point and we then think “….ok…. so whats next? What now?” No longer is the material tied together by threads of abandonment and the writing has changed accordingly to reflect that. The lines and imagery that have been the framework that the tracks have been built on so far, I have had for between “months”, “days” and “years” in some cases.

Songs that at the moment are just first draft lyrics, but that I hope to form the album with are: Lives of Glass, Parallel Lives, Where Are My Heroes Now?, Silent Time, Land Of The Low White Sun, Raindrops and Razorblades, Say Nothing and lastly the title track, Time Demands.

The only one of them that can claim any kind of lineage at all is Where Are My Heroes Now?… this was a concept that was tackled on the 2016 BASCA Songwriting Camp at the now defunct Monnow Valley Studios in the beautiful county of Monmouthshire (which for me ended up being more of a Production Retreat than a Songwriting Retreat, but thats another story)… there was a track produced or I should say more accurately, half produced that two of the three writers I was working with that day (to another brief by the legend that is Rita Campbell) which they both took away and used… and by virtue of being in the room at the time and lobbing in the occasional breadcrumb to the discussion, I ended up with a 30% share in it… and it was actually the song that got me my first PRS royalty cheque when it was included in a couple of Open Mic sessions by its lead composer in deepest darkest Leicestershire about 8 years ago… so it is more important to my history than I would ordinarily credit, it allowed me to be able to call myself (with some scant justification…) a professional songwriter…

I didnt follow up on it though, although I liked the idea; it was particularly pertinent as 2016 was the year when it seemed like half the legends of the music industry were dying every week which was most disconcerting, but I’ll talk more about that in the story of the song itself in another post.

The storyboard behind it is one that I have still used, but the lyrics this time are completely mine and the music will be original as well. Suno was used as a sounding board for meter and lyrical structure for the track, but nothing else and I dont anticipate it getting a look in on the finished product if I can help it…

So, as it stands at the moment, these lyrics, for everything really, are at the first draft stage. I will look to add them to the catalogue over the coming days and explain how they came about and where I see them going.

There is also the matter of the other tracks mentioned before about the Chasing A Rainbow soundtrack which can be worked on, plus a small number of Silent Edges/Alter Zero songs which need to be done for completeness as one last EP, but I must prioritize Time Demands and Echoes for now. If I can get this work done by summer of next year, I’ll be very happy.

So, once this week is done, I’m hoping to start making very real progress in making these works real and making the most of the time to be creative. This is, after all, what I retired to be able to do more of.

I’ll do my very best to keep you all updated over the coming weeks with the songs as they evolve and with the album projects as they come to life.

Latest Developments on Planet KOAS

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Well, it has been a short while since the last update, or should I say, flurry of updates which occurred in August. Its now halfway through October and things have moved on…. and are still moving on.

The most important one is that the day job is no more. No more real life to get in the way. I have, with effect from August this year, on reaching the grand old wizened age of 60, retired from the IT profession that I had inhabited since my mid to late 20’s. Never say never again that I wont go back into it or some other job at some point in the next 18 to 24 months or so, but as it stands at the moment; there isnt an impetus to do that and there isnt an intention to either and I dont expect to re-appraise that much before Spring next year.

So, I can return to a place where I was about 14 years ago, where it was possible to devote my time to my creative passions without having to share the time with a job and even better, without having to commute. This is obviously a big step and one that has been pretty much 42 years in the making and I hope I can make the most of the years in front of me to be as productive as I can be.

The next most relevant matter is that the house move has been completed and the studio room has been mostly set up (I say mostly, because the room has most of the hardware that will be required to run the studio and most of it is in place, but there is still quite a bit more of “trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot” where there is additional instrumentation or other relics of the old studio that still need to live somewhere and as I hinted at last time, the new room is significantly smaller). Ergonomically, things are better and the new Glorious Studio Compact desk is almost a third of the size of its predecessor, which is going to take some getting used to. I am going to seriously try to have better organised cabling than the old room as well, but that is going to be a game of jenga that is barely starting at the moment. Some of the existing cable sets will be adequate, but others, I sense, are likely to be a nightmare and certain items of hardware that I use as part of the regular workflow are maybe not quite going to be so easy to hand as they used to be.

Never mind, its something that is underway as I speak. I’m hoping to have all of the legacy hardware stuff dealt with by the end of next week, mainly the migration of 14 years worth of data from an old iMac and a Mac Pro 5,1 which has served me very well for the last 4 years to a Mac Studio M1 Ultra. There are more recent iterations of the Studio available, but after a lot of research, the M1 Ultra because of its high core count was deemed to be the most suitable option and the one that delivers best bang for buck.

As it stands at the moment, the biggest boat anchor on the migration process isnt believe it or not, the transfer of data (some of the disks will just be taken out of one array and placed in another and all the software programs will need to be re-downloaded and installed anyway (now that is going to consume some serious bandwidth))… its the deletion of the legacy data from the old 5,1 system.

As I look at the screen now, there is something like 3.7million files currently deleted and a whole s-pile more to follow. And until those are completed I cannot dismount the disks and add them to their new array. It will be good for productivity when I can clear this old equipment out of the way and sell it on so that others may get to use it as successfully as I have managed to. The 5,1 still works and while I’m typing now, it is flying along, but when you start shovelling some serious coal on it and expecting it to deal with modern plugins which are ever more demanding, it starts to creak and groan and even though its incredibly adaptable and updateable and is built like the IT equivalent of the old BMW E39 5-series – massively, massively overengineered for its time – I dont think anyone at Apple seriously thought these things would still be going nearly 20 years later. Given how throwaway the PC universe is, nearly 20 years out of a Mac Pro is…. well, way beyond what my expectations were. I dont want to scrap the main one or its two Tepid Standby machines, but I guess I’ll soon find out whether there is a market still for them, especially when whoever is buying them is going to have to come and collect them from Warwick. I have no intentions whatsoever of sending them through the post. Not a hope in hell.

And the other major matter of importance, which I didnt really expect to go in this direction, is the souring of the relationship with Soundcloud and Soundcloud Pro in particular. This has now broken down irrevocably and in due course, all of the material that I have historically had with Soundcloud will now be moved off of that platform and on to Bandcamp. I will no longer refer anyone to Soundcloud in order to hear any of my material apart from initial releases.

The crux of the problem revolved around monetisation, which was mainly the whole point of Soundcloud Pro. As I have repeatedly said, I didnt get into this to make money and will never charge for my work, but if someone else is running a streaming service or acting as a middle-man for a streamer and is making money out of my art, it is only fair that I get a percentage like everyone else. And, given that in its first two weeks, Monochrome seemed to do better than I had ever expected – Scarlet & Gold getting 1600+ plays in the first two weeks, more than I’ve ever had before – it became something that I became keen to sort out and to get as many of the tracks registered with PRS as possible and getting all the necessary data such as ISRC codes and the such like and then getting the tracks ready on Soundcloud Pro. So far so good, one would think.

Well, yes and no. Some of the uploading process can be a bit tortuous where a lot of the practise is automated and needs (in my very humble opinion) far too much validation and verification and I found that I kept on getting snagged by an automated process of Soundcloud’s which kept asking me for licensing details for my tracks because they were concerned that I had been using unauthorised samples, etc. This became particularly protracted when I uploaded the tracks that had been generated with Suno AI, forming the most recent release of mine, The Echo Of Unmade Miles.

I made sure that Suno was credited accordingly and was absolutely open and honest about AI’s part in the creation of these tracks and who did what. But, Soundcloud’s algorithm kept on rejecting them, asking for clearances and licenses and then it started happening to regular tracks that had no AI in them whatsoever, such as The Last Word, from Monochrome and they kept on getting rejected and rejected. This eventually pissed me off enough for me to complain to Soundcloud, after their AI bot proved utterly useless in trying to get me an answer to why this kept happening. Initially, their reply was lamentable. We will get back to you within two weeks but we’re extraordinarily busy. Coming from someone who has spent 20+ years in delivery of IT services, that was bad enough, but what followed after the first two weeks was laughable; sorry that it has taken this long to reach out to you, if the thing is still a problem, please reply to this ticket or create another one. Oh dear.

So, I did create another one, and another one and another one, particularly where it was related to the Suno created tracks. Eventually, got a rather sniffy reply about there being no generative AI content permitted on Soundcloud Pro and here is where it got interesting, you cannot use AI content at all on Soundcloud Pro unless you do it through one of their existing AI partners, and it lists 8 or so firms.

The first one at the top of the list, if you check them out, is a generative AI firm. There is a very … bitter, very prejudicial atmosphere around the use of Generative AI in the music industry at the moment, some of it very nasty and sneery. What Soundcloud really meant in this case is that you couldnt use Suno generated AI content, because they, Soundcloud, had already got a partnership with another Gen AI firm who probably gave them better margins and quite likely demanded that Suno should be excluded if the deal was to go through.

So, they dont have a problem with Gen AI per se, but only if the price is right. And a lot of the current fuss from industry insiders is that they dont have a problem with it in the publishing and label world, so long as they get a cut of it. Screw the artists and the composers, (much as there is much howling and wailing about “will someone please think of the poor artists”, the same ones they’ve been ripping off for generations with sharp practises, selling access to the artists work for streaming for a pittance), the main thing so far as they are concerned is that the copyright in the recorded works that they possess has to have a special licence, (which will obviously cost more for Gen AI producers like Suno), although in reality, it doesnt matter. Suno and other Gen AI producers train their engines on material already out there and the labels and publishers and the likes of YouTube dont give a flying one as to who listens so long as it chalks up another stat. The allusion that I had in my previous peice about it being absolutely no different whatsoever in the way that Difford and Tilbrook used to write, or Elton John and Bernie Taupin absolutely holds water. The only difference is the speed at which it happens, and the speed at which it learns. Takes humans a lifetime, takes machines mere minutes.

And as I’ve also been on record as saying, once the industry brings the AI world to heel and creates its own inescapable licensing jail, the amount of labels who will create their own AI based acts who will no doubt perform in future as holograms, (as per the most recent ABBA shows in London testify to), acts who dont in reality exist either because they are dead or because they were a creation of fiction in the first place and therefore will never be paid for what they allegedly create, will never have any kind of royalty/audit trail whatsoever… those who know the industry even in passing, know that they are indeed cynical enough to make this happen and I fully expect to see it well within the next decade.

But as I often say…. I digress. Suffice it to say, I refuse to play this game with Soundcloud Pro where I have to prove to them that my works are created without the use of unlicensed samples although their AI engine can accuse me of having done so without any evidence whatsoever in return for a piffling streaming rate. Im absolutely not going to tolerate that at all and it was clear that Soundcloud were not going to budge, so I quit. I told them where they could put their account and how far up they could insert it.

It also got me thinking about a new strategy for how I publicise my art and it is likely that this blog will co-exist alongside another format, such as a substack or something similar and I may use both together to generate more views of the art that I make. I still wont charge for it, that will never change, but I will need to work on a better way of increasing visibility. And ordinary Soundcloud may still be a front door at which some of the works may initially be publicised, but I will never ever go back to Soundcloud Pro. That is over and done. Watch this space, as they say.

And there are currently 4.1 million items deleted or deleting off of this particular legacy system. I think I’d better be prepared to settle down for the long haul where that is concerned, LOLZ.

But enough of all that. I stand at the precipice of a new way of creating and a new start in life for my art, I continue to contribute to the motion picture project Dogs!…Waiting To Be Loved as a voice artist and the advent of not only Suno but also other AI vocalising platforms such as the impending release of IK Multimedia’s Re-Sing offer some great potentials to go back and review some of the AlterZero and early KOAS works to see if they can be rolled in more glitter – or more diplomatically, be given a new lease of life. Plus there were some very old AlterZero tracks that never really made it to being recorded properly and were never properly captured and had justice done to them…. it would be nice to use the opportunity to be able to bring some of those old songs to life… White Flag Surrender, Paradise In Four Miles, Time Wont Change Things... those three in particular deserve to be made as good as I can get them.

And, in the meantime, AI assisted or not, I still intend to make good use of the time I have now, writing and composing and releasing from a newly inspired creative space.

4.3 million now and still counting. I’ll update you more when the new room is completely ready. It wont be too long…. and just as I finish this article, so does the deletion process.

Perfect timing. I’ll keep you all posted. Thanks for your patience and sticking with me.

Oh and just for clarity… the saved picture is not a real one, its AI generated. When the real room is done, I’ll share it.

Latest Update – and a “new” EP….

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

“….We live in the shadows and
We had the chance and threw it awayAnd it’s never going to be the same‘Cause the years are falling by like the rainIt’s never gonna be the same‘Til the life I knew comes to my house and saysHello, hello (it’s good to be back)Hello, hello (it’s good to be back)….”

© Glitter/Noel Gallagher/Mike Leander, “Hello” from the album ‘Whats The Story Morning Glory?’, 1995

This is getting to be like London buses of old… nothing for ages, then three at once.

My last two posts were about two particular things; the release of the Monochrome EP which finally happened, after a long long gestation period and just immediately prior to that, my discovery of AI as a songwriting tool. Well, this particular post leans more on the latter as a source of inspiration as opposed to the former.

Monochrome has been uploaded to the usual place (my Soundcloud account) and has been monetized (my god, what an exercise in patience that was…. I can understand why a lot of artists dont bother…) and following on from that, I immersed myself fully in what Suno could do for me as a remote collaborative tool/substitute topline writer/composer/etc etc etc.

I made the effort to go trawling through a lot of old material, both that is on here and otherwise – going back indeed as far as the ideas for the soundtrack to a screenplay which I wrote back in 2005 called Chasing A Rainbow. Most of the songs from that period were composed from MIDI loops, both piano and drums and were somewhat limited in their scope, I think is probably the politest way of describing it… they were written as part of my learning process of being a writer and a lyricist. In most cases for that particular soundtrack, I had tried writing the more traditional way with the music first and the words being developed by scatting around it and seeing what fell out. In a lot of cases when it comes to songwriting, a lot of very successful artists have done just that for generations and it has worked admirably.

However…. when you’re trying to write something for a screenplay, thats a different matter, it has to tie in with the story. There were a couple of tracks on that screenplay soundtrack where I tried that and didnt really get anywhere in trying to get any music behind them… because I didnt really know how to compose properly at the time. Some might argue that I still dont, especially if I’m leaning on AI these days, but I dont need that kind of person in my life, LOLZ.

Anyway. I can feel myself digressing again, for a change. What I meant to say is that I’ve had a very good look around the collection of lyrics that I’ve got, many of which – most of which, actually – are on this site and have all their backstories in place. Some have ended up with revised names, but as I alluded to in one of my previous posts; the lions share of them have not done anything for the last decade from when they were written in a front room in Wiltshire; some had a cursory sniff from collaborators and one or two may have had versions recorded, as local demos for one particular collaborator but they have enough of their own material to publicise and they rightly play to their own strengths. And, I thought at the time, that I had written stronger stuff which in some cases, I did have the music for. For these songs, I had a kind of feel in mind, but no music and I didnt have the time back then to just keep on kicking ideas around until something happened, I had to concentrate on my profession and earning a living and the songs that I did have ready music for which ended up on the three EP’s that I’ve written and released already under the KOAS brand.

These other songs were languishing, but I always had complete confidence in the lyrics themselves and my experience with what Suno has managed to do with them has, to my mind, proven that. Even really difficult, challenging ambient pieces like Song For Jane and Epitaph – I had a notion as to what I wanted them to be, but somewhat embarrassingly for a producer, I hadnt a notion as to where to start. And, as I didnt have a female vocalist to hand and didnt really have the means to pay for a professional to do it – Suno has allowed me to bring these songs to life.

So….. I decided anyway to develop them into an album/EP … one that I elected to call The Echo Of Unmade Miles (A Collection Of Lost Hours).. and yes, that title was AI generated as well, LOLZ. Now, if I used all the tracks currently in the SUNO library, it would be enough for a triple album, if not more. However, while all the tracks are viable, not everyone of them is a standout. I will most likely make use of another of Suno’s features, which is being able to break out the tracks into stems and overdub them myself in Cubase once the house move is completed. And in that respect some of them may change again, and maybe others wont. Depends on how much time I get to indulge myself, LOLZ.

…but as it stands at the moment, the decision was taken to make use of the tracks that have been created from my lyrics using SUNO and to release them as The Echo Of Unmade Miles. They are in the usual place on Soundcloud, namely here:

I also made the effort to generate as much about this particular project around AI as I could, so that I could set it distinctly apart from the rest of my works, particularly Mondegreen, (which I still have to finish); the pictures used for the album cover/artwork were all generated in Chat GPT, the concept being that it is paying tribute to my Anglo American/Puerto Rican heritage, that I am half New Yorker, carrying a guitar case and walking towards a rainbow…. maybe even chasing it. Cant possibly imagine where that idea came from, LOLZ.

So… to draw things to a conclusion, so that I can get on with packing to move house (tomorrow, before you ask, so I am a tad up against it timewise), the material is out there, I hope that you get a chance to listen to it and to see if you like it; there should be a good, recognisable lyrical thread to the material and as always, I hope you enjoy it. As I say, it may get revisited in a year or two, once the new studio room is set up and the idea of re-doing/remixing a good number of the tracks from No Expectations has not been completely discounted…. there is a lot to do. And thats before we think about writing anything new so, theres a lot going on. Coins In A Fountain, Burning Bridges, Song For Jane, Unspoken Words, Epitaph, Song For Jane, Strange Girl, Heart and Every Time I See Her are ones that I am particularly happy with and are good standalone works that could have been written/performed by a real commercial writing team (ahem).

But, have a listen when you get the chance over the summer please and absolutely feel free to let me know what you think; both of the songs themselves and the whole AI In Music debate which is raging like a brushfire at the moment.

Til next time, I hope you enjoy the summer.

Time Demands… and the way forward

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

“….Fire in the mirror, sky turns black
Voices whisper, no way back
Shadows dancing, freedom calls
We rise again, as the silence falls…..”

© The Velvet Sundown, “As The Silence Falls”, 2025

Well…. a month is a long time in songwriting, so it would seem. No updates for a couple of years and then suddenly two come along together less than a month apart. Almost like London buses, as they used to say.

There have been things going on and there is a reason for this update which may provoke some conversation or exchanges of views, it may not.

Firstly, the more important one is that Monochrome is at the mastering stage which I am hoping to complete this week so that I can get it out there into the world before I have to shut everything down and complete my packing to move house in early August. Its not exactly clear when the new studio will be set up, but I seriously doubt that it will be this side of October 2025 if I tell the truth. So, getting Monochrome out of the door is an important step and its almost there.

The second thing that has happened in the last few days which has put a shot of adrenaline into my metaphorical musical arm is the arrival of AI. Now, as the lyrics above relate to, there has been a lot of noise around this particular band that went from nowhere to Spotify playlists and over a million plays in next to no time where they absolutely rose without trace and a lot of the usual music business YouTube community has been chuntering about it quite extensively.

Is it a cynical creation from nothing by a record label in order to generate more income but leaving no visible trace that has any royalty responsibilities going forward with all the rights being held by the label and is this a sign of, unless it is stopped, the way that the music industry is going to go?

Arguably yes and almost certainly yes, to answer both questions.

Anyway. Digression over… I was unwittingly steered in the direction of one of the AI Music creation sites by one of these commentators and decided to take a look at it. The AI Music creation site I decided to take a look at was Suno.

… and by the way, this post is in no way paid or sponsored by them, LOLZ.

As you well know if you’ve followed me thus far (and if you havent, where the hell have you been?), I am primarily a lyricist, and I have, surprise surprise, lots of lyrics around here on this here site, a lot of them from a purple patch around 10-12 years ago when it all just seemed to pour out while I was living in Wiltshire and a lot of those have gone nowhere. I havent done anything with them and while there were some very very loose – and I mean seriously loose – preconceptions about the forms that some of them would take, a number of them were more like free-form poems than lyrics. Some of them I was quite happy with in terms of their phrasing and their structure and what they said but had no attendant musical structure or ideas to go with them and others, because they didnt quite come out fully formed were just added to the site and then left to grow the proverbial moss all over them.

So, it seemed like a tool like Suno might be able to offer a writer like me some sort of perspective on these lyrics, if I were to enter them into the AI toolset and choose some either quite loose or quite strict musical criteria as to what the end product should sound like. There were a whole pile of different musical styles to choose from, some quite genre specific, some quite woolly, some quite ethereal and others that I’d never heard of and were just plain damned confusing, LOLZ.

As there was a free option, I chose that to see what it could do with some of the trickier customers that I’d had which maybe one or two collaborators might have picked up on but havent really progressed… and others that had just been buried and forgotten about. What could be the worst that could happen?

First one into the fiery pit was Come Home Soon. Loosely inspired by a Marillion theme of being far away and its quicker to come home by finishing the entire journey rather than abandoning it, but with an original Nora Jones meter, this one hadnt gone anywhere really. Dave Barnes had had a go at it but I havent heard it for years. So, this was the proverbial sacrificial lamb to the AI Beast.

And the result that came out were thus….

https://suno.com/s/ligMXj2rlmopTEnM

Very pleasantly surprised and bordering on the shocked that it look less than 20 seconds to offer me not one but two interpretations. Based on the following criteria: unplugged, natural, honest, poignant, longing, soaring, authentic.

Granted its not 24/96, its not dripping in the blood, sweat and tears of my honest musical labours (chance’d be a fine thing), but in many respects; this is no different to me giving some lyrics to a topline writer or a “real” musician (not that I’d know what any of those look like these days, LOLZ) and for them to go “aaaahhh, yes, I’ve got just the thing for that!” – like a proverbial Elton John who just sits behind a page of Taupin lyrics and it just pours out…. and like Mick Hucknall said that Laurent Dozier was like when writing songs for the A New Flame album – the melodies and toplines just kept pouring out and pouring out and he was like a kid trying to put his finger in the dam to try and keep the flow under control and to be able to use it and channel all this musical energy.

I readily agree that to a lot of real musicians, this may be seen as the spawn of Satan that we must crush and do so decisively and do it now before it all becomes self aware and destroys us all, but I repeat…. how really is it different to giving lyrics to a topline writer or composer, especially these days by email? I dont think it is that different. Especially when you consider now the established tools that some of us have been using for years like EZ Drummer and EZ Keys and the use of midi files and midi loops to compose. Like having a session player next to you, their advertising strapline used to read. And a lot of those tools have enabled me, a non-playing – well more like a “not really playing” musician to be able to produce coming up on 4 albums worth of work.

Bloody hell, I thought. If I get to be even more specific or granular with what I ask it to do, what is this thing capable of?

So what did I do? Did I frantically try and weld the lid back on the can of worms in the corner that says “Danger-Worms! Do Not Open!”?

Did I hell. I added a couple more of the more challenging sets of lyrics that I liked but hadnt done anything with. I dove in and drank the lake dry, LOLZ. Dont Talk About It followed:

https://suno.com/s/SKJJUxtfEPldka4r

Not quite as funky as I had first imagined it, as it had a kind of James Grant feel to it when I first wrote those lyrics. From the criteria of: warm reverb, expressive percussion, raw male vocals, polished, acoustic drums, eighties, commercial, 120BPM, this is what it brought me and I have to say, I thought ok, thats workable, thats viable, maybe I can build something from that…. whats next?

Well, that was the proverbial floodgate opening. OK, lets give it some really tricky ones, like Once Was Promising.

I mean, this thing was inspired by Midnight Rider by The Allman Brothers ferchrissakes. And while it doesnt sit in the same postcode, its not a million miles away and to my mind, it proves the lyrics were strong enough in the first place. Now I thought, we’re starting to find some genuinely viable tracks that could either be pushed out in their own right, or that I could re-record properly based on what Suno had composed.

And each of these had taken less than 20 seconds to be generated.

https://suno.com/s/0ayOEfJ1WClsvMoM

and it goes on and on. Touch, Another Day, Never Be Mine, Unspoken Words, Deep Deep Blue, All That You Wanted, The Wishing Game, Burning Bridges, Song For Jane, Strange Girl, Amorphous… Once I had ran out of free goes to weigh up whether it was worth using this toolset, the decision was taken for me to be a subscriber and the decision made itself. All of these sets of lyrics, as honestly and earnestly as they were written, were the proverbial problem children that didnt have the music to turn them into songs.

Now they do.

And there are all manner of styles there that these songs have been performed in by Suno’s toolsets; Green Day, Clannad, The Calling, Michael Buble–like jazz, Country Meets Rickenbacker 12 string, hell theres even a Motown-y one that is like Al Green sings the cynical lyrics of Paul Heaton. (aka Heart On A Shelf)

https://suno.com/s/wU6oNxUPrZtDJf6N

And if you pardon the vernacular, that really f**king works and all these were from first drafts, without a detailed understanding of what the toolset can really do when it is pushed.

At this point I was starting to get quite…. I dont know if I’d go as far as “excited”, but it was really something to think “damn, I knew these were good lyrics that just needed a good producer or another musician/collaborator to bring them to life”.. and Song For Jane… well, that really exceeded expectations. That was, when I first heard it, so beautifully encapsulating what I wanted it to say that it almost brought me to tears. Woah.

So…. the library is there to show what can be done with those lyrics and what Suno has done with them. Rights-wise, as the lyricist I have the copyright share that I would expect to.

I didnt write them to make money, but as with any collaboration, I have no problem in Suno taking a percentage if these tracks make any money. If it chooses to and if it can leverage its catalogue of works to be able to make money that may find its way back to contributors like me that covers the annual subscription fee (unlikely, I know, LOLZ) then so much the better.

Much as I’d loved to have created them with real collaborators, as I’ve had a full time career up to now, I’ve not really had the time to do so and my usual collaborators have all got their own real lives to be getting on with.

I dont need them –  my collaborators or my lyrics that is – to make money, much as I think that they might deserve to, thats not my decision.

As Gordon Sumner once observed at the Brits many many years ago when he was festooned with a lifetime achievement award, “music is its own reward”. At the time I thought that “well, given you live in a country mansion like a Squire, practising tantric sex and disappearing up ones own fundament to count the millions in royalties, yes, it probably is…”

Its something that is very easy to say when you’ve already reached a position of commercial success.

But…. as age often does, it teaches you that actually…. actually, theres something in that statement. It brings its own joy. I dont need to do it for a living. But, I would be happy to, if the opportunity arose, to move it from hobbyist semi-professional to something else.

I am very conscious of the fact that in about 3 weeks time I will be sixty years old. Much as I hope to have a lot of time to be able to devote to creating music, getting contiguous blocks of time to build up songs like these is going to be challenging. And some of these – no, the majority of these – songs are already a decade old and have languished doing nothing. The use of a toolset like Suno has afforded me the chance to bring these songs to life and give them a chance to breathe on their own.

And the AI performers sure as hell sing a damn sight better than I’ve been able to in 25 years, if not longer, LOLZ.

And as a writer, I have to take that opportunity and embrace it. So, while a lot of other musicians or creators may eye AI’s involvement in the future with a great deal of suspicion and justified cynicism, I defy them to say to solo lyricists like me that this song doesnt work, because I would argue passionately that it fluppin’ well does…

https://suno.com/s/dVIsywCyRopa1jgd

Yes, the industry will cynically exploit AI and what it creates for money. That is a given. They have been cynically exploiting performers, real human performers, for decades and always will do, if people insist on signing deals with labels and publishers. It is the apex predator of capitalist industries, using Intellectual Property to make money and denying the creators of those works the ownership of those works as a default. There have been a lot of dark and bad things written about the industry over the years and the vast majority of them are true.

I fully support and understand artists deciding to remain totally independent and actively choosing not to sign to a label these days and remaining in full control of their careers. It is a very different musical age that we’re living in.

Without tooting my own horn too loud, I’m as good a lyricist as anyone on my day. And this set of tools helps me to prove it.

The other part of the update, aside from this huge elephant in the room, is how does this affect Mondegreen? Is the album still going to take the same form when it eventually gets worked on later in the year?

Most likely yes. The work is very advanced on Mondegreen and I’ll need to review it in more detail when the new studio is built to make sure I’m still wholly on board with it. I reserve the right to change my mind, LOLZ.

There is though (and here we come, after a very long, tortuous journey to get there), the possibility of a follow on work, which may – I havent decided yet – include some of these works from Suno that I may re-work or keep as they are but remix (and provide my own instrumentation and production). There are other lyrics and lines in books that I have that havent been included in songs yet, but that are worthy of going somewhere.

Conceptually, the collection of songs that could be formed for these tracks is called Time Demands. I had thought of Abcission or a couple of other names for collections of future tracks, but I quite like Time Demands. That came along when I was trying to write a song for a friend who probably doesnt need music right now – or rather he thinks he doesnt – and while the lyrical ideas came, they didnt really gel into anything. But, time does demand that I pull my finger out and get on with it and thats what I intend to do.

So, the future does indeed look interesting in terms of what I can do with my music. I should imagine that I may well release the Suno versions will at some point under a collective name, but we’ll see. That decision hasnt been taken yet.

The next you’ll hear of me should be by the end of next week at the latest when Monochrome should be released.

Til then, my friends.

Latest Update, June 2025

/ stevehunt18 / 2 Comments

“…If everything could ever be this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again
The only thing I’ll ever ask of you
You’ve got to promise not to stop when I say when…”

© David E. Grohl, 1997 from the album “The Colour And The Shape”

Well… its been a long, long time. I havent updated this blog since like, forever. Thats not to say that there haven’t been things happening. There absolutely have been, I can promise you that, LOLZ.

Thank you for coming back and returning to this long, long old journey with me. I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting for so long.

…but there has been an awful lot of Real Life Getting In The Way, which I guess is something that happens a lot to creatives, whether they be professionals or not. Whilst I have been pushing on with the two KOAS EP’s (and boy has that progress been millimetric at times), I have not been writing for a while. Most of the creative efforts have been around slowly but surely inching the two KOAS EP’s closer and closer to the finish line.

And they are indeed, almost there.

Well, to be specific, one of them is. Monochrome is at a very advanced stage and is due to be finished within the next 4 weeks. Mondegreen, on the other hand has faced some challenges along the way and as a result is going to slip until probably the autumn of this year when I will do my best to finish it.

More of Monochrome later on.

Mondegreen, on the other hand…. While I was quite content with the tracks as they’d been built, no matter how much I tried to bash Hate into shape and to bring the lyrics into it which I had written, they just wouldnt fit. No matter what. That was kinda disappointing because in and of themselves, as components, they were good. They just wouldnt play nicely together and it quickly became obvious that it had to be at least temporarily parked while I got on with the rest of the project.

So, something told me that I had to put that song to one side and come back to it some other time. It could be that the music and the lyrics will be parted out and end up coming back to life in other compositions that are wildly different from what I conceived for them, its too early to tell.

In its place came Love Me Or Leave Me Alone, which has had a sniff at Real Life already, thanks to my long time collaborator David Barnes, (or David Bjorn as he is now known). It is pretty much in the form that I envisaged that it would be, with the exception of the Nutini-style vocals which I heard in my minds ear when I first wrote the words.

In terms of it being a good enough track to be included on the Mondegreen EP and for it to be thematically correct to be on it, it definitely ticks those boxes. There are going to be three covers that are on that EP (I cant remember if I said what they would be or not, so just in case I didnt, I’m going to be open about it now). They are three tracks that have had a profound effect on me over the years and ones that I had been confident (at some point) that I would have been able to do some sort of justice to. They were originally meant to be just piano and voice, but I would be kidding myself if I were to stand there with my chest puffed out thinking that I had strong enough piano chops or indeed a strong enough voice to be able to really pull these tracks off in their simplest form.

So, I had to think somewhat laterally and I think the best way of putting it is that I should capitalise on the bits that I can really do properly and then leverage the other things at my disposal to make these versions all that they could be.

….Which is a euphemism for tuning software and EZKeys, LOLZ.

I have no shame in admitting it. Those who really know me know that I have no problem in leaning on technology. I dont lean on technology like a drunk does to a lamp-post, but I do try and make as much of it as I need to in order to achieve my objective (ahem).

These songs are important to me and its important that I do them justice.

Anyway, stop beating around the bush, Steve I hear you say. What are the three songs that are being covered?

Well, the first one is Faith Healer by The Big Dish, from the album Creeping Up On Jesus. I first heard this song in Cyprus in 1987 when it was released and it truly changed my life. I love Steven Lindsay’s work and as a vocalist and as a writer, he has been a huge huge influence on me as his work is honest, methodical and sincere. I did contemplate as to whether it should have been Miss America or Across The Provinces from the later Satellites album instead, but no, Faith Healer was a seminal track for me.

The second one is A Wing & A Prayer by The Mission from the album Children, produced by John Paul Jones. I’ve long been a huge fan of Wayne Hussey as a guitar player and as a writer for decades and I strongly believe that in both capacities he is sadly under-recognised. I cant explain why, but while A Wing & A Prayer is mainly wordplay, there is something about it that I always thought would make a good piano and vocal track, to let the lyrics and the vocal performance really, really shine. Its the one that secretly I hope that someone eventually does on The Voice, LOLZ. Am I the one to be able to do that? Well, I gave it my best shot.

The third one and arguably the most ambitious of all, is Advice For The Young At Heart by Tears For Fears, the closing track of side 1 of the Seeds Of Love album. Roland Orzabal is one of the writers that I have respected very deeply and been heavily inspired by for many, many years now and this track written by him and Nicky Holland is…. well…. musically, its not that tricky, but vocally it is particularly challenging considering Curt Smith spent most of the pre-chorus deep in his falsetto range.

And, despite Roland’s undisputed vocal virtuosity, listening to the demos that he cut at the Townhouse back in 1988/89, it didnt suit him. The final cut had to be done by Curt. It is really challenging to try and do it properly and I’ve had to make some comprimises in how I approached it, so while I have done my best to honour the song, it is a little different to what you might expect.

The song itself, and its lyrical content, has meant so much to me for so many years, especially the lines

“… Love is a promise, love is a souvenir
Once given, never forgotten
Never let it disappear
This could be our last chance
When we gonna make it work?…”

I find it poignant, I find it relevant to what I think and to my “lived experience” as the kids call it these days, to how I feel and believe and I wanted to have a go at it.

So, the three covers tracks for Mondegreen are thus. Hence the concept of a Mondegreen being something you think you’ve heard before, but not in the way you think you have. I think I’ve met that particular threshold, LOLZ.

… but that is going to take some time to finish yet. There is still quite a bit more polishing to do on that EP and I dont really have the time available at the moment to do so.

I am due to retire from the IT industry in less than two months time and also am going to be moving house, so my studio space is going to be very very different to what it has been for the last decade and a half since I started writing. So, I have to concentrate on Monochrome at the moment and push the target completion date out to the autumn at least so that I can at least start that mixing and mastering stage for Mondegreen with a clean slate. That is likely to happen on new equipment as well and will definitely be done in a different recording and mixing space in Warwick instead of in Rugby where I have been since 2017.

Monochrome, as I say, is in quite an advanced state and I am spending a good amount of time during the evenings whenever possible polishing and mixing and eq’ing and compressing and balancing… I’m at the stage now where I’ve completed the stem mixes and the final mixes arent that far off. I’m due to move, as I say, in early August and I am setting a target of the middle of July for Monochrome to be completed and released. So, by that point it has to be as good as I can get it.

In the meantime… I have also become an organic gardener, growing my own produce (which is another equally addictive creative past-time that I never expected to pick up) and I have also become involved with a motion picture/musical project through the US family which I have been doing some recent character/voice acting readings… which may or may not go somewhere.

I hope to have proven myself worthy of a place on this particular project, but that is the decision of the Executive Producer and her team, so we’ll see what happens there; I am also, as I have noted before, coming to the tail end of my 42 year long IT industry career which I am hoping not to have to go back to at any point; we are not going to be under any kind of financial pressure to go back into the workplace, so I am hoping to spend the majority of my retirement as a writer and producer and maybe a voice artist, but time will tell.

In the meantime, my existing flat has to be de-cluttered, I have to work out what I’m taking and what is being junked, I have to hand over my professional responsibilities to my successor at work… there is an awful lot going on and I am at probably one of the busiest points in my life and am likely to remain in that heightened state until probably October.

And I’m going to be 60 in less than 2 months.

I know I’ve not said a lot for quite a while.

…but it doesnt mean I havent been doing anything. Absolutely not, I’ve been as busy as hell.

And hopefully, I will get to keep this blog up to date a lot more than what I have been doing.

I’m back….. Back For Good? I hope so……

KOAS Album News

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

I’ve just returned from Florida in the last 36 hours and there was a lot of time not only for contemplating the subject of what to do with the KOAS album/EP releases but also to discuss the matter with two experienced professionals who have been there, bought the T-shirt and much more on many occasions and also to examine some options.

Previously, I had looked at both TuneCore and CDBaby as possible outlets for a formal release of both London Road and No Expectations and I’ve also considered doing a small print run of CD’s. All these options are still in the background and may be taken up on but a number of conversations and reactions while I was in the US have led me to the decision that I have taken today. The first was one that I already knew anyway, but was confirmed by a highly reputable US Producer and Mix Engineer re-emphasising how challenging it is to get songs cut these days by professional artists (and theres no reason to believe that the US and UK are any different in that respect); the second was that given the strongest part of my suit is that of lyricism – and I was aware of this anyway and had been reminded of it before – the words are largely lost on those who were listening. Part of that comes of them being very personal, which I was aware of anyway and proceeded with full knowledge of that fact; and lastly that I never set out to make either of these offerings to make money. That was never a factor. The intention in the case of London Road was for it to be a calling card for collaborative writing, like an actors showreel. The intention of No Expectations was for it to be a cathartic musical legacy to four important people in my life.

So, the decision that was taken was that the albums will be released on here and will be free to download by anyone who wants them, whenever they want them. No need for any registration, no pricing – just simple downloads of either Apple m4a tracks or .wav files at 16bit/44.1khz, which despite being several times the size, are also more open and sound much better as they have more dynamic range. If anyone wishes to donate anything when they download the music, they can do, and if they dont want to, they dont have to. The key thing is that the songs are listened to, regardless. The only person who puts any real financial value on these songs as memories (yet), is me. But their emotional value to me is obviously, much higher than what it cost to record and release them.

Over the next week or so, I will finalise the artwork and the mastering output levels for the files and add the appropriate buttons on this site to enable easy access to the albums. As it stands at this precise moment, everything has been mastered with the requirements of iTunes and the two aforementioned aggregators in mind which are to put it politely, quite conservative – nothing peaks louder than -8.2db, so it never gets really loud at all and if anything for domestic consumption, they’re probably a tad too quiet and can be boosted a bit (this was the main question I had for the Producer/Mix Engineer as he has vast experience of finishing mixes prior to mastering and his Maximizer plugin is permanently glued into the red). These tweaks are minor ones which will take only a few short hours to accomplish, so I’m targeting the May Bank Holiday as a release date for both offerings. I can then close this particular project and then move on to the next one over the summer, which I have to admit, I’m quite upbeat about. I’ll be able to apply all the many lessons I’ve learned during the gestation of these two which should  – hopefully –  mean the time to releasing the difficult second album should be shorter (famous last words, no doubt, LOL).

So.. in closing… watch this space. The release date for both London Road and No Expectations is imminent.

Latest News on Project KOAS

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment
“You are far
I’m never gonna be your star
I’ll pick up the pieces and mend my heart
Maybe I’ll be strong enough
I don’t know where to start
But I’ll never find peace of mind,
While I listen to my heart
People…
You can never change the way they feel
Better let them do just what they will
For they will…. If you let them….” 
© George Michael, Kissing A Fool, 1988

Well… its 9.45 in the evening in the UK and as it stands right now…. the mastering work on the albums is now finished.

Its been quite challenging and educational for someone who has largely been a hands-off engineer and aspiring Producer  – when it comes to putting together demos of both my own work and those for others, at least… I’ve had the ideas but there has always been someone who makes a living from engineering or mastering or producing to put that final fairy dust on the finished product.

When it comes to putting together something in your own name though, the goal was always to make it as good as I could with the experience that I had. And…. as I’m the closest one to the project, I can hear all the lumps and bumps and imperfections and things that make me think “… yeah, I should really go back and fix that…” So, it’ll never be perfect. Such things very rarely are. Indeed, some figure that all the lumps and bumps make it a bit more honest and… real. FWIW, I think the jury is out on that.

But, with respect to the other old adage which goes along the lines of  “there are never any finished mixes, only abandoned ones”, I can honestly, hand on heart, listen back to the final 2 track masters and be glad of what I have and I’m happy for them to be let loose on the world as they are… They are as good as I can get them to be (and believe me, I’ve tried, LOL), with my level of expertise as a player, a singer, a writer and a producer… at this stage of my career, that is. Next time… now that might be different. But more of that later.

There certainly were some interesting challenges along the way in trying to get the completed .wav files to sound as good as I could when mastering them into “lossy”/compressed formats like m4a, MP3 and so on. That took quite a lot of test pressings to get right and finally getting hold of Mastered For iTunes tools from Apple as well. Once that particular hurdle was out of the way, the rest of it was pretty much a downhill run to the finish line although it did take quite a few late nights, which I think have started to catch up with me recently!

As per the last blog update, the albums have been sequenced, they have all been put through a good mastering package (Izotope Ozone 7) and then treated with another very handy vst, Waves Abbey Road Vinyl which gives them that kind of old vinyl warmth and fuzzyness around the edges, taking off some of the harshness.  They were all recorded, mixed and mastered on headphones (Beyer DT770 Pro) –  the intended listening medium for these songs has always been headphones, never monitors and I would venture that a lot of people who may well listen to this music will do so over earbuds or headphones; it has been mastered with them in mind. I’ve also very consciously made sure I’m on the right side of the loudness wars as well and everything has been mastered very conservatively, peaking at no more than -8.2db, to ensure that if it gets submitted to the likes of iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc that the songs can make sure they’re within the loudness restrictions that these providers have stipulated.

Ah yes, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify etc. There comes the big final question and the one that I have not yet decided to answer: After having waved my own flags so hard for the last two years on this project, its not lost on me that I have to make a decision (always a bad thing, LOL) about what to do with these songs now I’ve given them life. Do I keep them locked up in the proverbial basement on a diet of bread and water (obviously not, I’m not that creepy) or do I let them fly with the best chance they’ve got of reaching new shores, but charge them a Club Class ticket price for doing so?

Or…. to be less cryptic/obtuse…. “Do I give them away for free, or do I sell them?”

I’m kinda torn where this is concerned. London Road is and always has been a calling card, almost like a demo album to advertise my ability to to other musicians, writers, producers, etc as a marker of my ability as a songwriter and lyricist, proving that I can play nicely with others, LOL. No Expectations was always a musical legacy to not only my late father (who kept on sending me damned jazz music to write, from the other realm… I used to hate jazz. You’ve no idea how much, hahaha…), but also to three very, very important women in my life who came into it and when they left it, they left leaving huge footprints on my heart that no rainstorms will ever wash away. It was never, ever going to be about money. It was about doing something that I hoped would be remembered, so that neither they nor what I thought of them would ever be forgotten. It is much more thematically coherent than London Road and that was always the intention.

So, I’m in a bit of a quandary. Part of me wants to go the Radiohead way and just put it out there and invite people to just take it and if they want to make a donation, they can, but if they dont, then so long as they give the material a listen, I dont mind. In the most recent distribution from PRS4Music that I’ve had, songs that I have co-written are starting to earn me some royalties, which is great. It’ll never be enough for me to retire on, but I never expected it to. All of the material is registered and if it ever pops up anywhere and gets played where the collection societies get to know about it, a few cents will roll into my hat. And thats fine. I’m happy with that. Limousines, the devils dandruff and private jets are all so passe anyway, LOL. 

The other part of me says that if I’m to put the material where it has the best chance of being heard by not only the wider public – ie, aggregators like Tunecore, CDBaby and so on – there has to be some kind of concept as to how much it is going to cost. So, I have to bring money into it, whether I like it or not. I can distribute it myself via this site or a similar one, but the reach is not going to be as good as what it would be through an aggregator.

Lots of food for thought then, while I go to Florida on holiday to see the family for a week…

Ultimately, what it boils down to is that both albums, regardless of which way they walk out of the front door of my life, to find their place in the world, should be released digitally in early May 2018.

And then onto the next project. I’ve already got half an idea as to what I’m going to call it (but thats for another post) and I’ve already got some tracks that are in gestation that I would like to feature on it and the overall musical direction it will go in. And this will be something that I will record with the motivation of selling it, as opposed to being so open to the idea of giving it away.

The big difference this time, I’m not going to be so dumb as to chain myself to a timescale. It’ll be ready when its ready. When I’ve returned from Florida and that final decision regarding distribution has been made, then I’ll put up another post announcing what it is, and where the material will be available from and so on and so on…

 

Project KOAS Album Track Listings and Running Orders

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

The decision has been made on the track listings and running order for the upcoming album and EP that have formed the KOAS project. As per the original goal, one album will be comprised exclusively of collaborative material (London Road) and the other will be self written (No Expectations).

As mentioned before, there is always an exception to every rule and the exception in this case is Five Years, which is a collaborative track between myself and Robert Pearce, but is thematically much better placed to be on this album than London Road.

Track Listing and Running order for No Expectations:

Stay
The Fear Of Missing Out
Stars
Let It Go
No Getting Over You
Doesn’t Matter Now
What Became Of Love
Castles In The Sky
Five Years

Track Listing and Running order for London Road:

Elia
Escape From The Shadows
Come Talk To Me
South To The Sun
Without You
This Time

I don’t expect any changes to be made to these listings following final mixdown and mastering; I’m confident that this is going to be the finished running order in both cases. I also expect both to be completed and available by early May at the very latest.

I’ll share more detail when it becomes clearer.