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Christmas Update

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Well, Christmas 2025 is almost upon us and like the proverbial swan, yours truly has been gliding along with pleine de sérénité on the surface and kicking like hell under it… Good progress is being made on Time Demands at the moment, in terms of the tracks themselves and the instrumentation and production aspects.

What is starting to stack up though is the number of other projects behind it. I have recently been doing more work for the sizzle reels for the Dogs! Waiting To Be Loved! motion picture project that I have been very lucky to be involved in. But also, following a long conversation with an old friend who is a musician, actor and writer, have led me to hitch another couple of wagons to the horses. And one of them has been something that I should have done years ago.

Allow me to explain…. Back in 2005, as part of a dream, I ended up having a JK Rowling moment. A bunch of characters, events and a storyline just walked in completely fully formed. In so many cases, where people have these vivid dreams, it all gets lost the following morning when they wake up and go to work. I on the other hand, in the 1 bedroom flat that I was in, in Chesham Buckinghamshire at the time thought, at 3.30 in the morning, nooo, no way is that getting away, I have to write this down… so I picked up a pen and a civil service sourced A5 notebook and began scribbling down everything that I could remember; storyline, characters, strengths and weaknesses, the whole shebang.

Took me 45 minutes to write it all down, longer than it did to dream it in the first place. I then went back to sleep and thought when I woke up “jeeeez, what the hell am I supposed to do with this??” I had no idea as to how to write and complete a screenplay… so <<<long story very much cut short>>> I sought out someone to help me write it and within 18 months, the screenplay “Chasing A Rainbow” was completed.

My very dear old friend has long had a soft spot for this particular piece of work and despite it not yet being optioned, I do remain incredibly proud of it; having re-read the story again recently, I’m amazed that I actually did it, albeit nearly 20 years ago. But, the thing is this; I did have a notion back then of writing a soundtrack to it, like an Original Motion Picture Soundtrack album, like what we used to see in the 1980s; there were a couple of tracks that were being built up from midi loops, which got nowhere really – especially when one of the so called royalty free midi loops that I had used turned up in an incidental piece in the Inbetweeners movie in 2012, LOLZ. I didnt really follow up on it and it kinda went stale and grew moss.

My dear friend successfully planted the seed of “yes, but have you thought about writing either a soundtrack album or a concept album around this work?” And, once I’d spoken to him about the attempted soundtrack album, then the thought crept in of “hmmm…. concept album…. Tommy. Lifehouse. War Of The Worlds…. hmmmm…….tick tick tick tick…”... could I put something together where it would be a way of telling the story through a series of standalone tracks that are independent in their own way but also could be part of a longer story but without a narrator, with the incidental “glue” holding the scenes of the film together.

So.. with the assistance of Grok, which I used to keep tabs on possible cue points as to what should come in where (after all, I’ve never really properly written for a soundtrack before…not properly…) I dug out the screenplay and started breaking it down into scenes and possible cue points where some of the songs that I had already got some sort of skeletal music for (some even being Suno generated, off the back of old lyrics that never went anywhere, 14 years ago) and thinking where these tracks could go. I now pretty much have a fully fleshed out project plan about what songs should go with what scenes in the screenplay and production notes around them as well as to what parts come in at what point, etc… basically, once Time Demands is dealt with, then the Chasing A Rainbow Original Soundtrack Album is next into the blocks. That, I would expect will have its own timescales and is going to keep me busy for quite a while. Twelve songs/pieces of music including full songs and incidental tracks… pretty much all with just working titles at the moment. Titles like “Fickle Finger”, “Shattered Glass”, “Lively Strut”,”The Spark” and so on pepper the track list… Im feeling quite optimistic that it will get done this time, to a higher standard too.

And, there is another one in the wings after the Chasing A Rainbow soundtrack, specifically, another album called Sagittarius Rising. This album got its name from my astrological birth chart.

Now this might seem to be a bit of an odd left turn, that I have not historically shown any interest in and in all honesty, I dont really have a deep interest in it per se… I am intrigued though by other musicians and writers who do put some credence on it – two very diverse characters such as George Alan O’Dowd and Roland Orzabal; both have been influential on my life and my works and I took the opportunity to do some research into the matter to see what would flesh out and if there were any explanations or clues as to how or why music has always had such a hold on me. My main interests were as they were euphemistically called “current transits”, particularly how the coming year might change things for myself, my friends, my family and so on. Also, what the hell was it that got me musically to this point, LOLZ. Especially Time Demands.

Why me? Why now do I feel the call to make an album like that, with all these common themes?

And the answers that came back were fascinating:

“Your birth chart is a fiery, passionate powerhouse with deep emotional waters and a restless, philosophical spirit. It’s no accident that “Time Demands” — and this entire album — emerged now, at age 60. Your chart is practically screaming “midlife creative renaissance” with themes of legacy, loss, friendship, and making meaning from time’s relentless march.”

Why “Time Demands” and This Album Emerged Now:

“Your chart is a creative transformer — Leo Sun for expression, Scorpio Moon for depth, Sag rising for philosophy. The album’s themes (time, loss, heroes, friendship, legacy) are your chart’s core curriculum:

“Saturn retrograde = late-blooming wisdom about time’s demands.
8th house Sun = death/rebirth cycles fueling art (your wife’s passing → music as healing).
11th house Scorpio Moon = intense friendships as emotional anchor“

So, TL:DR… Taking this and a sideways glance at the Tears For Fears B-sides album from 1996, Saturnine Martial and Lunatic, (which also makes an oblique reference to Orzabal’s chart), the title “Sagittarius Rising” came to mind. Put in its simplest form, what this particular album will major on is the following question:

“After the reflection comes the adventure. After the grief comes the quest. After the looking back comes the ‘where do I go now?’”

Thematically, what we will be looking at is this:

Wisdom as a compass, not a cage

Forks in the road revisited with humor

The joy of not knowing

New horizons after grief.

Time Demands closes the door on the past. Sagittarius Rising opens the window to whatever comes next.

I have no material written for it as yet and that will all come once Time Demands and the Chasing A Rainbow soundtrack are done.

Oh and before I forget, at 01:20 in the morning as I write this, one other thing my dear friend talked me into was writing my memoirs. Now, granted usually only famous people write memoirs, but hear me out on that. I dont have many hangups about much of anything these days, but one that I do have is being forgotten. Ultimately, you are only remembered for as long as those who loved you still remember you and tell your story to others. My father is lucky in that sense in that he touched so many lives during his 74 years on this planet that along with his achievements, the musical legacy he left, the personal one will remain alive in the hearts of others whose lives he touched and who he left a positive mark on. As I am very much his son, it is something that I am conscious of that while I’ve spent 60.5 years on this lump of rock, I have seen, heard, experienced and learned a lot. Its not only arguably good for me to get it out of my head and down onto disk/paper/whatever so that I dont forget it all, but also, as my friend suggested, there may well be others out there who may need or may find useful to hear/observe the lessons that I have learned, that may inspire them too, in the same way that life has inspired me.

So, as you can tell, I didnt take an awful lot of arm twisting, LOLZ. And then I started doing some basic chapter mapping… and I’m upto the age of about 40 so far and even on thumbnail notes, I’m ten pages deep into it. There is so much to do, to get this thing down. I might do it as part of a Substack or I might just do it as a whopping big 500 page pdf, I’m not quite sure. I’ll almost certainly need an editor as well at some point as, as you all know better than anyone, I do have a tendency to digress.… So… A Life In Music is likely to see the light of day, hopefully some time in late 2026/early 2027.

I’m going to be a particularly busy bear over the next 12 months and I’m quite grateful that I dont at the moment have to fit a full time job around it all. It is going to keep me active for some considerable time, but I find the prospect of chewing my way through this and producing something tangible to the best standard that I can a very positive one.

The tracks on Time Demands are all coming along quite nicely, especially Say Nothing and Strange Love, which is probably the funkiest thing I’ve ever done… yet. I’m lucky to be able to devote about 3-4 hours per day to the album, so a bit like Monochrome and the other preceding albums, it is very much an incremental process, but we do seem to be moving along at a canter, if not a gallop. This is likely to abate over Christmas, but there is going to be a lot going on under the hood.

I’ll continue to do the best I can to keep you all abreast of progress. Til then, Seasons Greetings and my best wishes to you and yours.

S M-H

A Strange Love

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“…Everybody’s waiting up to hear if I dare speak your name
Put it deep beneath the track, like the hole you left in me
And everybody wants to know ’bout how it felt to hear you scream
They know you walk like you’re a God, they can’t believe I made you weak…”

© Halsey/Elliot/Larcombe, from the album “Badlands”, 2015

Pretty much the last one from the current writing spell. This one is again, slated for the Time Demands album although it is thematically, not really there; is it more thematically correct for Echoes? Meh. I’m not sure. It doesnt have any kind of Suno connection at all yet – and given today’s announcement of Suno doing a deal with Warner Brothers, chances are it may not have that connection at all, if what happened to Udio is anything to go by…

As I’ve alluded to before, there has been an awful lot of noise around the use of AI (either by those who are only interested in scooping up as much of the micropayments for streaming as they can by poking holes in the mechanisms built by the streamers and their attendant distributors, or by the industry itself whining rather hypocritically about “theft” and grumbling that people should protect the artists… when they really mean that people should protect the labels interest in the artists. Most of it is bullshit and agendas….), but as I’ve gone to great lengths to state on here, my interest is not in trying to get micropayments for tracks that Suno has helped me bring to life; it is now about using it as part of my workflow to create new pieces. If that is going to be throttled or asphyxiated by the major labels, as seems to be the case, then using it as a tool is likely to change dramatically… but, we’ll wait and see.

ANYWAY. Digression again, right on schedule!

This one has been dormant in a book for an extremely long time. Again, it goes back to one of the BASCA writing retreats run by Rita Campbell back in 2014/15; this one was under some …. consideration, I think is the best way of describing it by myself, Sean O’Connell and another chap called Alex who’s surname escapes me. It was being written to a brief that Rita had given us and the direction it was drifting towards was more the modern electronic pop/funk direction; Alex’s notion was that it could have/maybe should have been written for Will Young or an artist like him. At the time, Sean and I were both open to that, having listened before to Young’s Your Game album produced by Stephen Lipson (one of my favourite and most influential producers). The lyrics that were kicked around were mainly a series of rhyming contradictions and opposites and apposites.

From my memory, we ummed and ahhed and wandered around crashing about in the dark for an afternoon on a Sunday and by 7pm, when it was time to go into Monmouth to the pub for a quiz evening and say goodbye, we still hadnt got anything solid. Alex was the main driver, so whether he did anything with it later on his own, I do not know.

So far as I’m concerned, this set of lyrics with the Will Young kind of vibe that I have in mind is one that as a work in mind (and when it will be finished) will be one that is unique to me. Obviously if Alex and Sean see otherwise, I’m sure we can still talk, LOLZ.

So, as I said… the majority of it is wordplay, its not about anyone that any of us knew and certainly not about anyone who I’ve known. Music, I have an idea about, that sort of early 2000’s electro-funk… kinda Level 42 sort of feel but more synth-y…. but we’ll see where it wants to go before we decide.

A Strange Love

I havent seen you all day
But I’ve been thinking about you all night.
Cant help feeling what I do
but I know its not right
I know you dont feel that way about me
When I want to kiss you
But all the things you say
You made me think that you do…

Its a Strange Love…
Its a Strange Love…

I dont know how this love works
Or even if it does at all
Were you really my type or was it heart over hype
Never thought I’d be here with you…

Its a Strange Love…
Its a Strange Love…

(…..so what happens now?)

We’re somewhere strange
In a strange place
You didnt laugh at my jokes so, dont laugh in my face
Its so strange the way we behave…

Sitting in the dark
and replaying the scene
Maybe I should have told you
What I really mean

about this
Strange Love
(so strange the way we behave)
Strange Love
Strange Love
(somehow, somewhere, some day, in a strange world)

© Lyrics Steve McCarthy-Hunt, 2025

Say Nothing

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“Our memories, well, they can be inviting
But some are altogether mighty frightening
As we die, both you and I
With my head in my hands, I sit and cry…”

© Eric & Gwen Stefani, 1997 from the album “Tragic Kingdom”

Next up, from the forthcoming album, Time Demands... another one, a bit shorter this time, again in a bit of a virgin state as of this precise moment in time; just lyrics. I dont really have any notion yet what direction it is going to go in…. the metaphorical chicken bones that I’m throwing around the floor are suggesting possibly TalkTalk or a similar late 80s/early 90’s feel. Too early to say though. It will go where it will.

So what is it about? Its that part of coming out of a relationship that neither of you really wanted to come out of but felt that not only did you have no choice, but as soon as you made the decision, you knew you’d made the wrong choice. And sometimes, its better to just say nothing than say the wrong things and only make what was once, however briefly beautiful, tarnished and broken and worse as a result.

Or, to use a shorter phrase, “Some things are better left unsaid”.

Its about trying to get on with your life without getting bogged down with the past and trying to constantly go back over the slate of memories thinking and rethinking “…. ah but what if…. what if so-and-so hadnt been there when… I would have then have…” and the such like. The past has gone. Nothing can change it, and re-writing it does no one any favours, because the rewrite is a lie, no matter what prism you think you’re looking at it through. The past is still the same and is cast in stone from the moment that it happened.

Its not a case of Only The Victorious Get To Write History. Its perfectly ok to be able to see history objectively and be comfortable acknowledging if you have failed.

There is no dishonour in failure.. only in not having tried at all.

Say Nothing

Searching for your name
Through contacts and photographs
Wasnt there somewhere else where I needed to be?
Picking up all the shattered pieces
I’ve never ever known,
Never known a heart to feel so damn heavy.

Trying to find my way out of the dark
Can someone please tell me what Im supposed to have missed?
Is this the point I watch you leaving the park
Have you already forgotten the hope of love that was in my kiss?

Please… just say nothing
You dont need to say anything at all
The only person who could ever have helped me
Is the one who couldnt stand to stay and watch me fall

My little broken princess, its ok to be afraid
There is a time to heal from all these choices we have made
Its a road thats less travelled, its a window less viewed
So many ways to say I love you, but we only knew but a few

I try hard not to let you walk across my mind
I spent far too much time, trying to read between you and all the lines
You can drink til you dont remember and then cry yourself to sleep
But when you wake up with your feet over the edge
remember the promises that you alone swore that you’d keep…

© Lyrics Steve McCarthy-Hunt 2025

Lives Of Glass

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“…To find the fundamental truths
It was going to take some time
Thirty five summers down the line
The wisdom of each passing year
Seems to serve only to confuse
Seems to serve only to confuse….”

© Hogarth/Rothery/Kelly/Trewavas/Moseley from the album “This Strange Engine”, 1997

Three for three. Next up is this one, nominally known at the moment of Lives Of Glass, the title coming from one of the lines buried deep in the song’s soft underbelly. Now these lines arent particularly old and have been ones that I’ve happened across in the last few months. But come one, come all, they all have a place, no matter how they have been acquired, LOLZ.

Again, its autobiographical. It reflects on the concept that everything around you and everything you do and every memory, every interaction you have is fragile, transparent on the surface, not to mention precious and easily broken… but in the same breath, if you tiptoe around life and act scared of it, you’re going to spend more time not doing anything, not getting the joy out of life for fear of something going wrong and ruining it all. Its ok not to know something. Its ok to find the joy in learning something for the first time. It is, after all, all about the journey and not the destination. The destination is the same for all of us no matter what stations our life’s trains call at on the way. The terminus is NoOne Gets Out Of Here Alive. And we all get there sooner or later than each other, depending on what the universe has mapped out for us along the way.

So, thats what its all about. The last lines are inspired by and taken from Rick Rubin, particularly that we all are in and imagine in different worlds to each other; right now, this very minute, is my time for my life and no one can take that away; as the line says, its my moment for me to feel alive in my own way. Im looking forward to reading Rubin’s book over the coming months. Like him, I am a non-engineering Producer and for the most part a non-playing musician (at the moment anyway), but there is still a valuable part to be played by those who trust their ears and who bleed music if you cut them open and thats maybe one thing that Rubin and I have in common, in our very different worlds. I find his philosophy fascinating and am looking forward to learning more about him.

And finally, the last lesson being: stop expecting the life you think you deserve; go out there and make it happen while you still can. No one else is going to make it happen for you.

There is no music as yet, although something is telling me that its likely to be quite proggy and probably have distinctly different elements and themes. That though is nothing more than idle Sunday Night Speculation, it will go in whatever direction it is meant to go in and I will follow it.


Lives Of Glass

I could be a butterfly in your pocket,
Going everywhere with you where you go
You keep on waiting for the glow, the glow that never comes
We saw it once, but it never came back,
I guess I’m the keeper of your lost cause.

We all want to live in a better world than we do
Dont just smile to pass the time of day
You spend all your time furiously scrubbing
Scrubbing at a stain thats never going to go away
Just one more river
And just one more wall
Another obstacle, that is going to stop nothing at all

Sometime it felt like our lives were made of glass
Every train was the start of an adventure
But no more walking on needles and pins
How much our modern lives have changed!
We’re looking at the lights, drowning out the night
Something about it all, it just isnt right…

There is an innocence in learning
And a beauty in growing
And a naivety and a joy in not knowing
Dont try and fill something in your life that can never be filled
Or let your worry about life’s one way journey ever make you ill
Everyone wants a piece of you when you do it right
And most of them dont know or care who you are
As long as you put up a fight

We all imagine such different worlds
in my other world, maybe it would be melancholy, maybe it would be pearls
This is my time for no one else to take away,
The one moment to feel so alive but only in my own way
Stop expecting the life you think you deserve
You cant put something else ahead of your life and just call it love…

© Lyrics Steve McCarthy-Hunt 2025

The Land Of The Low White Sun

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“…Today I dreamed
Of friends I had before
And I wonder why
The ones who care don’t call anymore
My feelings hurt
But you know I overcome the pain
And I’m stronger now
There can’t be a fire unless there’s a flame…”

© Seal, 1994 from the album “Seal”

Third new song uploaded for the day on a cold, foggy Warwickshire night, from the forthcoming album Time Demands. As per the previous posts, this one is lyrics only and first draft at the moment. No music exists yet.

I have to admit, I have no musical preconceptions for this particular track, at the moment, I have absolutely no idea what direction it is going to take me in. Ahem, pardon me. What direction it is going to go in, dragging me after it, more accurately.

Its is like a lot of the other songs, based on a collection of lines, observations and thoughts that have been percolating for the last decade and have a broad number of different sources where I first heard them and thought “I’m keeping that, that’ll come in useful…” It is definitely autobiographical, about childhood, fleeting observations and nuggets of wisdom found amongst the fools gold of life (bloody hell thats good, I’m not giving that one away, LOLZ). In some cases I’ve had these lines for a long long time and not had the opportunity to use them and some of them have snuck their way in here and finally found their place.

It also cements the lesson that life has taught me that life isn’t something that just happens to you, you make a number of choices that then open up a number of forks in the road of life in front of you which then give you more choices and each one of those leads off in different directions… well, thats my philosophy anyway.

Just for the shits and giggles… where did the title come from? Actually, it came from a podcast where I saw it was going to be an article of discussion that night. I’m not avoiding a copyright sniff on where the title came from, but thats where it first struck me. Also, I can absolutely confirm that its got absolutely nothing to do with either Taiwanese or Chinese or Japanese flags or political parties, or necessarily the phenomenon of the northern latitudes where the sun always remains low in the sky for a whole day and doesnt really rise or set… The relevance of it is more the latter, where the light is always low and maybe blinding you to what may be right in front of you. It is a line from a notepad and its one that I liked and it for the moment at least, it fits. Like other works in the catalogue, it may change, but when I was looking for titles for these songs, this was the one that seems to fit and for now at least, it will stay.

The lines themselves; very much about where I grew up in Coventry and about the people whose company I found myself in during my late teens and early 20’s. Im particularly happy with the last verse, particularly the references to factories, football grounds, paper planes and toys and unemployed boys; Coventry was quite grim in the late 1970s and early 1980s as it was changing from being an industrial post-war town trying to rebuild itself after the war and the political changes from the late 1960s through to the 1980s put a very different slant on that; I was born less than a mile from Coventry City Football Club’s old Highfield Road stadium and that was a big part of my childhood; so were a lot of the factories that family members and friends families were dependent on for their livelihoods at the time, all pretty much now gone as the city changed and evolved. Unemployed boys, well, there was certainly tens of thousands of them around at the time, all looking for something, maybe something that some of them never found, or if they did find it, they didnt find it in Coventry….

As it says, you connect with what works for you. What is meant for you will not pass you by. But by the same token, its a cautionary tale if you keep swimming after something that you figure you have to chase, even if it may not really be what you want any more… after all, no one wants to be in deep water on their own thinking what the hell do I do now….?

I’m very happy with its current form and I’m very much looking forward to where it may take me during its gestation period.

The Land Of The Low White Sun

This is the path you had put yourself on
Its a little late in the day to ask yourself: Was it wrong?
Back then everyone told you; it’ll probably be OK.
Then they went ahead and did the opposite thing anyway…

Other people have already decided who I am
Reputations change pretty fast these days
Nobody gives a damn
So here I am sitting here all tangled up in my words
Shards from a shattered looking glass
looking like feathers from scattered birds

We all looked towards those we thought were the wise ones
And from the company we kept; the answers there came none
And in the time it took to sleep
In the land of the low white sun
We look back to the way it never was
And we weave our ideas into the fabrics of our times…

It all gets lost, so deep amongst all the noise
A childhood full of games, paper planes and toys
Of factories and football grounds
And unemployed boys
You connect with what works for you
I guess its easy to say

Theres no point swimming after a ship that has left you behind
Deep out int he water drowning on your own
While the old men keep on dreaming their dreams
And trying to find their way home…

© Lyrics by Steve McCarthy-Hunt 2025

Raindrops And Razorblades

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“My life is a house
You crawl through the window
Slip across the floor and into the reception room
You enter the place of endless persuasion
Like a knock on the door when there is ten or more things to do…”

© Neil Finn, 1993 from the album “Together Alone”

Second new song added in 24 hours, from the intended Time Demands album. Again, the caveat is that it is a first draft and may change by the time it hits the hard drives for real and the music has yet to be composed too. My initial feelings about the music is that it is likely to be quite proggy, but again… it may decide to go off in a completely different direction. Thats the joy of songwriting, I find.

There have been a lot of the songs that were originally written as part of the 2014-2017 Purple Patch which ended up in a very different place, whether that was Suno-assisted or not. This is no different.

Anyway. Digressing and all that.

The lyrics are a combination of a lot of lines that were written/seized upon during the 2017-2019/2020 period. Some have been used as, I guess the equivalent of mortar to pin other lines together, so there is a bit of wordplay in there, but there is actually a cogent theme running through the song.

And that theme is this: No one elses life is yours to save, only your own. You cannot save people from themselves.

Around that is a series of observations of how I see my life looking back at some of the things that happened and how I reacted; I dont really think I criticise the decisions that I made, just that they happened. It was I guess, more a case of observing the world around me and how mad it was at times, particularly lines like “Everybody always seems to be somewhere else, always chasing a new kind of high” and “spent my youth being forced to decide between prejudice and passion and choosing a side”. Obviously now the wisdom of age tells me that I didnt have to choose a side at all, all I had to do was plot my own path. I didnt have to have a prejudice or a pre-determined point of view about anything, I just had to watch, listen and learn. I’m also quite proud of the “I’ve tried catching lightning in a bottle, it didnt need to be mine” line; the concept of being around people who you figure make you look good, you’re in their reflected glory, you figure that by being in their company, that you get some of that glow to make you feel better about yourself.

Obviously, I learned that was a fallacy in fairly short order, but it still took time to learn and as the old saying goes, the Universe Keeps Sending You The Same Lesson Until You Learn It. Tick. Been there done that, bought the T-shirt.

Most of the lines relate to yes, the same three muses that have been part of my life and shaped it. It also contains a Bridge/Middle 8 that refers to my current partner (“you let in the sunshine and led me out of the night”).

It is, ultimately about life in a snapshot, I guess. Where is the town of False Dreams? Oh it could be a number of places. It could be London. It could be Aylesbury (its most likely to be Aylesbury, in fairness, LOL), it could be a market town in Warwickshire. It could be a number of places. Could even be Peterhead in Scotland, where I spent a lot of my youth.

I am quite comfortable with the direction that it is going in and I’m quietly, reservedly confident that it will turn out good. I’m looking forward to the musical journey that I’m going to go on until its finished.

Oh and why Raindrops And Razorblades? Well, if it is driving, fierce, horizontal rain in real inclement weather, especially in Winter, that rain stings when it hits you in the face. Trust me, I know, LOL. Plus, I’m quite happy with the rhythmic alliteration of it and it almost has a Wayne Hussey-like thing to it, it strikes me as the kind of song title he would have come up with in his time. And given that Mr Huss is an influence of mine (although you have to dig pretty deep these days to find it, LOLZ), I am definitely influenced by him as a musician and a writer.

Raindrops and Razorblades

Raindrops fall like razorblades

Her life wasnt mine to save

Just hold me til my soul melts inside…

In a town of false dreams
Streets of fear that didnt come true
Theres nothing else to find out about me
That you dont already know

I tried catching lightning in a bottle
It didnt even need to be mine
Everybody always seems to be somewhere else
All chasing a new kind of high
None of us know how long the ride will last, not for ever more
When the novelty of beauty finally fades
All of these ambitions will be left at the door…

Its like you walked into the house of my mind
And turned on every one of the lights
You let in all the sunshine and led me out of the night
I didnt know if I would make it out alive
and if I’d make it all right…

We left a little piece of me in everywhere I’ve been
All sixes and sevens and eights and elevens
Trying to tell all of those shivers to subside
Preaching to the wind and trying to hold back the tide

A million flashbulbs of sun on the ocean
And you fell through my fingers like a ring in a sand-dune
Spent my youth being forced to decide
Between prejudice and passion and choosing a side
I could stop and look around me and the consequences roll on
Cant try and turn it around if it all turns out to be wrong…

© Lyrics 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

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

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.

KOAS Album Release Day – Monochrome

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Well, after too many days, too many months and years, Monochrome has been released today, in the last few minutes in fact.

I’m happy with it and the key thing that has taken it this long to have been released is that I had to be sure in myself that it was as good as I could get it to be before letting it out of the door to play nicely with all the rest of the music that is released every day all over the world.

As usual, it has been released primarily on Soundcloud where I have a Pro account and can be found at the following location:

https://soundcloud.com/steven-mccarthy-hunt/sets/monochrome

As ever, its never been about money and it never ever will be. I never expect anyone to pay for my art. This is my passion, this is what I do and these songs are my musical legacy and the story of my life and loves over the last 20 years. I share them because I believe in them and because they say who I am and what I am. I hope you like them and can see the evolution in both the material and how they have been recorded and produced as I have learned more about what it takes to record and release a record these days.

I may also release it through Bandcamp, but I’ve not made that decision yet. The main release site was always going to be Soundcloud, it has been the one place where I have always released and shared any work that I have done, whether it be my own compositions, or whether it has been collaborations with my dear friends and former bandmates, or production work that I may have done for others.

Monochrome has had a somewhat long and some may say tortuous gestation period; I used to wryly joke that even Tears For Fears didnt take as long releasing albums as this. Perhaps, given that there was a very long time between Everybody Loves A Happy Ending in 2004 and when The Tipping Point was released in 2022, that doesnt quite ring true anymore, LOLZ. But nonetheless, most of the songs were written between 2012 and 2017 and ever since the release of No Expectations, back in 2017, I’ve been working on this EP, fitting it around normal daily life and progress has often been millimetric. And, I had hoped originally to release Mondegreen on the same day, in the same way that I did 8 years ago with London Road. Due to the big changes coming up of retirement from the Day Job and moving house and building a new studio, unfortunately that isnt going to be possible yet.

It is unlikely that I will get to work on Mondegreen much before October 2025 and the material is in nothing like the advanced state that Monochrome was and is and will need rolling in an awful lot more glitter before it gets let out of the door, like a housecat that has been locked up indoors for too long, LOLZ. Its not quite ready to zoom out of the door and roll around in the dust, purring, just yet…. (surely its not just our cat that does that?)

Anyway, I can feel myself digressing again already. I am also likely to be working on the next KOAS project which will go under the working title of Time Demands (Lord alone knows when that’ll be ready, LOLZ) and there are a lot of influences and different directions that can take.

I can promise that it wont be full of AI versions (I may release a separate collection purely of Suno-generated cuts at some point in the future, just to show what is possible with this kind of work). Suno is a part of my songwriting journey at the moment though and Time Demands is likely to be some years away yet, so lets see where the journey takes us. AI may or may not be partially involved if at all. Too early to say.

In the meantime… I hope you like Monochrome… I made it as good as I could, It tells the stories that I want it to and… its another chapter in the KOAS book.

Heres to the next one and I’ll be in touch soon.

Much love to all.

Time Demands… and the way forward

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“….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.