To whomever is reading this,

A long time ago, when I was growing up, I was intrigued by songs that told a story. Songs like Eric Clapton’s “I Shot The Sheriff,” Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” Paper Lace’s, “The Night Chicago Died”, Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” and Don McLean’s “American Pie,” to name a few all featured visuals of life woven into a story that became the foundation for great music.

These were followed by songs from The Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, John Cougar Mellencamp, John Hiatt, Van Morrison, Jimmy Buffet, and many others. The radio waves would be filled with music that contained stories that became inspiration.

I didn’t sit down to intentionally write music; what I knew about music was what I heard. But as I would hear songs, I would start to play around with changing lyrics in my head. I liked the challenge of writing lines that rhymed to create a story. It seems like somewhere in the back of my mind, a light had been shown, and for some reason, my mind would take events in my life and create verses and short stories in 10 to 15 minutes. Or I would wake up at 3am with all the lines playing in my head, and I would jot them down on a pad by my nightstand.

Even now, if I think of an interesting title and play around with it, I will eventually wake up early in the dark of the morning with a rhymed story. 

As I moved through life, new thoughts and new ideas would find a way into these stories. Working a job for a paycheck, falling in and out of relationships, feeling like every step forward became a few steps back, hitting the road, moving around, a stint on the West Coast becoming an elusive search for paradise—these moments in life would wind up becoming words in little story vignettes.

Then what? Nothing. They first went into a composition notebook that followed me around as I went through life. After that composition notebook, the stories became text files on a computer. That pad on the nightstand became an iPod, then an iPhone.

But in the end, that’s all they ever became: electronic words collecting digital dust. That is until artificial intelligence, or AI, came along. To make a long story short, these words finally found music. Using AI I was able to create types of songs that I felt portrayed what I thought when I created the lyrics. Some songs took a couple of tries to get what I wanted, and others took a long time.

In the end if AI hadn’t come along, they would’ve probably fallen into an electronic abyss, never to be heard…

If these “songs” can bring a little bit of enjoyment into someone’s life, then maybe they have found a purpose. That makes it all the worthwhile!

Enjoy.

Robert Fury