update

Parallel Lives

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

“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

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

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.

“Hang On Lads…. change of plan…”

/ stevehunt18 / 7 Comments

Might seem to be a bit of an odd one to have two posts in a day. However…. not without good cause.

Putting it in its simplest terms, the EP formerly known as Mondegreen is not going to be completed in the timeframe that I was intending it to. To use the vernacular, it has been “canned“.

The main reason that it has been shelved indefinitely is related to the migration from the old Mac Pro 5,1 to the new Mac Studio M1 Ultra. There were 7 Cubase hard drives in the Mac Pro and not that many spaces in the storage arrays for the M1 Ultra. One of the old hard drives had been presenting problems for a while and was known to be on its way out and liable to fail. I had, or so I thought, copied a signficant amount of the data that I had needed from that drive to another existing old hard drive. The migration exercise that I undertook a few days ago to shift as much of the work and the vst’s and plugins to newer, more stable drives was meant to cover this particular vulnerability off and there was one drive that was left that I didnt know what was on it, which I’ve just been checking this evening.

The long and short of it is, as disappointing as it sounds, the work that has been done for Mondegreen is now found to be incomplete. The three cover versions are available on existing disks that are on the network and they can still be worked on in Cubase 14. However, the files for Cross & Leave (On An Outwave), Love Me Or Leave Me Alone and Revolution In The Rain have disappeared into thin air and their sound files cannot be found across any of the disks. While I am disappointed in that the time invested in those three songs has been lost, I have to be brutally honest in saying that in at least 2 of the 3 cases, I was less than 100% happy with the direction that those tracks had been going in compared to the visions I originally had for them.

Given also that the failing hard drive which I suspected that these songs were all on, has now been disposed of, destructively... its a tough lesson but its one that I have to take on the chin, theres not an awful lot I can do about it now.

So…. as it stands at this moment in time, Mondegreen, as of today, is erased from the schedule. Time Demands is still on the slate and I am hoping that I can start making that work a lot less ethereal than it currently is and there is also the decision to be taken as to whether any of the tracks that were Suno developed on The Echo Of Unmade Miles are going to be re-done and overdubbed and made less AI-ey…. Mondegreen may come back in another form in a year or so and it is likely that Revolution In The Rain and Love Me Or Leave Me Alone will be revisited and we will see what we can do with them… so I have plenty to keep me occupied over the coming months. Just that Mondegreen will not be one of those projects.

Onwards and upwards though. No time for looking back. Tomorrow is another day.

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.

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

/ 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……

Latest Update

/ stevehunt18 / Leave a comment

It has been, I must say, probably the most upside down year that I have ever experienced in my life. That is probably the case for most of us, particularly those either the same age or younger than I. Our parent’s generation, particularly those in the UK and Europe who grew up during wartime and rationing and the Cold War may have experienced things that would not be a million miles removed from what we’re seeing now, but I think it can be safely observed that these are times that are alien to the vast majority of us.

I have, like many other non-professional musicians been somewhat financially fortunate to be able to have had a day job to be able to fall back upon and this has occupied the vast majority of my time over the last twelve months or so. The initial lockdown kept my partner and I apart for three months and this certainly allowed me to concentrate on the remix of the tracks for the AlterZero The Road Less Travelled EP; but beyond that, I have to admit that musically, it has been a very quiet time.

Now we have come to what is being sold as the end of the Lockdowns (time will tell whether it actually is or not, but I’m not going to get into that in this blog), and as I am between professional assignments, I have had some more time to come back to both writing and recording and making some progress on the KOAS tracks. Slowly but surely, the lumbering beast that is the KOAS Monochrome project is getting back on its feet and the writing and recording is inching forward. It is still likely to take some time to finish it because as much as I have some spare time to be able to devote to it, the necessity to earn a living and the machinations that go with that have not allowed me to allocate a block of time to exclusively work on the music. And, given how much the world is changing around us on a daily basis, particularly as it changes in a way that I have to admit that I am not really at all comfortable with, there are other things that I must prioritise. One of which is being able to sustain myself financially and the other is my elderly parents.

I cannot explain why I feel on almost a subliminal level as to why I am being guided and reminded by my spirit guides to look after my mother and stepfather and prioritise them above everything else, but that is the message that I am getting. I am lucky in the sense that they are both alive, both are in reasonably good health and neither have what have become known as co-morbidities. But, because of their age, I cannot lie, I am keeping a very close watch on them at the moment, particularly because of their enforced isolation over the last 12 months and the effects that it has had on them and how they see the world these days. As a result, while I am pushing to make progress on the music, by the same token, when they need me, I must prioritise them, while I am fortunate enough to still have them in my life.

Despite that, I have also found time to write and also to consider another project once the Monochrome EP is done. This work, I anticipate, is going to be a half self-written and half cover version EP; the working title is Mondegreen, which is, as I’m sure you know, something that you think you have heard clearly… but you have not heard quite what you may think you have. “Theres a bathroom on the right“, “the girl with colitis goes by”, and so on and so on. The title I think is appropriate more for the three cover versions that are going to be on the EP, which is not something I have done before. The covers that have been selected are… somewhat unexpected, shall we say. But, all three of them are songs which mean a great deal to me and always have done. This is a chance for me to try and do these songs justice and to reinterpret them in my own way.

And, it is not a great leap to announce as well that if half of the EP is cover versions, then the other half has to be self written or collaboratively written. To that end, so far there are three new songs that have come along, which I will detail further on with their own song notes over the next few days.

The most important thing about the Mondegreen project is whether that is going to be the end of the musical line or not, so far as I’m concerned. As I’m not in the flush of youth any more and the opportunities to collaborate as a writer and producer are also shrinking and not least, the way the changing world is ravaging the music industry and how people consume music these days, I have to consider whether I’m reaching a watershed in what I have to say, in a musical sense at least.

But that is a conversation for another day. As it stands for now, I’m back… and these EP’s will be done. Eventually…