I'VE RELEASED AN ALBUM!

A special note from Spen: If you can, please enjoy this edition in audio, by pressing the Article voiceover/Listen to Post button at the top. It’s the whole story below, but set to music!

Something very special and incredibly exciting has happened in my life in the last few months. Something that, as a dad, is the most priceless thing in the world. My ten-year-old daughter and I have found something that we have really connected over.

We’ve only released a music album together!

The band is called CLAWS, the album is called Rich in Red, and I’m finally ready to tell you about it.

If this story moves you to listen to a track, here are some of the links you need:

CLAWS - Rich In Red on Spotify / Apple / YouTube / Amazon

The process of making it has brought me more joy than I can describe and, well, just to get you in the mood, listen to this...

Okay, so the (possibly-not-so) big reveal is that this album has been made with AI.

I repeat - this is AI music!

Now, there has been some human input, some creative choices made by carbon-based life forms, and I’ll explain those to you, but the vocals, the instrumentation, and the melody choices are all AI.

And - come on - regardless of what you think about AI music, or this style of music in general, you’ve got to admit, this is amazing, isn’t it?

And today I want to ask a big favour of you.

I want to conduct an experiment. Now, we’re never going to crack the big time. I’ve already learned that you have to pay big bucks to promote an act on the streaming sites - that’s how they make their money. But I wonder whether, together, we can create enough listens to, well, give the algorithm a little tickle…

I would love for you to listen to a track or two, or even better, follow the band on your favourite streaming service.

It would absolutely make my daughter’s year.

There are 18 songs on the album. There’s rock, ballad, dance, electronic, so please take a listen wherever you get your music and let me know which track does it for you.

I don’t know whether you, my brilliant, sexy supporters, will be enough to make a difference, but if Spotify notices a few hundred new listeners in a short space of time, it might then think that Claws is worth recommending to other people. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?

Okay, here’s the story.

I love music.

I’ve always got music playing around the house and one day back in 2024, a song rolled onto the speakers and my daughter asked, “Who’s this?”

I said, “Why, do you like it?” and she said she did, and I said, “Well, it’s Meat Loaf,” which made her laugh. And I explained that although he sounded like dinner, he was actually a very hairy and very sweaty man who used to scare me when I was her age. But over time, I realized that his songs were pretty beautiful.

She seemed interested, so I played her some more rock music. I introduced her to one of the greatest guitar intros of all time, Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses, and I ended up making her a playlist of Van Halen and Dire Straits, Wheatus, Avril Lavigne, and the like.

I was not going to pass up a chance to shape her musical tastes.

Little did I know, though, that she was about to shape mine.

My girl is really creative. She draws a lot - mainly cats - but other animals are available. And a few days after we’d rocked out to Meat Loaf and Guns N’ Roses, she shows me a picture that she’s drawn.

I say, “Oh, what’s this?” and she replies, “It’s CLAWS.”

She’d drawn a five-piece female rock band. Importantly, each member was part human and part animal, of course.

And that’s not all. Now, remember, she’s just eight at the time, but she has properly thought this through. C-L-A-W and S are the initials of each band member: Celine, Lydia, Angel, Westa, and Satona.

I mean, they’re not even boring names! She’s just so imaginative. Oh, and she’s very specific about the animal hybrids, too. There’s a dog, a fox, a rabbit, a lemur, and a cat.

Meanwhile, I had been looking into AI-generated music. And back in 2024, this was a little-known thing. It wasn’t brilliant, but I decided to try and make a CLAWS song. So I gave the AI some details about the band, its members, I asked for a rock style, and it came up with a reasonable approximation of a song.

It was a bit crunchy, the vocals sounded pretty autotuned, but it was intriguingly passable.

And over the next few months, on and off, we made a few more songs. And for Christmas, as a surprise, I put them on a CD for her. I printed the album cover and the very first CLAWS album has a run of exactly one copy. And to be honest, I thought that was that.

Then we get to 2025. AI models have been getting better all the time, and so I decided it’s time to surprise my daughter. CLAWS are going to make a second album. And by this point, I know a lot more about how to make these AI models do what I want, too.

So the first thing I need is a killer opening track. I get the AI to create a song about the band having had a first album, they’ve taken a break, and now they are back for more, and this time they want to spread their love and music across the galaxy.

Once it was ready, I played my little girl the song and her reaction was just one word, but it made my heart explode. She said, “Wow.”

And so, together over the next few weeks, my daughter and I work on ideas for a few more songs in different styles. Some are hard rock, some are soft, some are a bit more electronic and some are dance. Like this one:

CLAWS - Neon Sun on Spotify / Apple / YouTube / Amazon

It is so easy to forget that this has been created mainly by AI. It is in no way what I would call unoriginal or robotic. Just listen to the breaks and drops that the AI has improvised and the really interesting melody choices in the second verse.

I see Neon Sun is the club hit - I can even picture the dance routine, for goodness’ sake! (honestly, I think I’m getting a bit carried away here…)

Now, as I say, this album is never going to be able to compete with the professional music industry - Big Music, if you will. But we’ve tried to include a decent mix of styles, so hopefully there is a little something for everyone.

And of course, no rock album would be complete without a couple of power ballads. So here’s one I created specially for my little girl.

CLAWS - Jewel on Spotify / Apple / YouTube / Amazon

By this point, I’m working with the AI to brainstorm lyrics. I knew what this song needed to be called - Jewel. I knew the sentiment, there were certain phrases that I wanted to include, and I could also ask for particular instruments - in this case, the flute and the harp.

Now, I say “ask” for instruments - that’s because with generative AI there’s no guarantee you’ll actually get what you ask for! This song did take a fair bit of back and forth, both with the lyrics and with the melody, but I think we got there in the end, and yeah, it really does perfectly capture my daughter in a song.

And then, because she’s brilliant and she loves drawing, my daughter decided that she was going to draw the album art for the second album.

She’s called it Rich in Red, and she’s really getting into the concept of album art: This is the second album, so it shows that the girls are now rolling in the wealth that they earned from the first album. They’re wearing red jewels, sitting on a red throne - it’s not quite Bat Out Of Hell album art, but it’s on its way!

But then my daughter drops a bombshell.

She tells me that she wants to write the lyrics to a song called Rich in Red.

This is terrifying.

I wonder whether you can work out why?

I mean, I’m a loving dad, sure. But I’m also a music geek and a slight control freak, and I am worried.

She was nine years old at the time. I wasn’t sure that she could write the lyrics for a good song.

Normally that wouldn’t be a problem. We would write loads of songs, and only the best ones would make it onto the album. BUT - this is the title track to the album! So if she writes this, it has to go on the album.

I mean, I can’t honestly say, “No, it’s a great idea, my darling, but no - Daddy’s going to have a go at this one.” I just can’t do that.

So she wrote the lyrics to Rich in Red.

Written down, they look weird. But that in itself is not a problem - a lot of great lyrics look weird when they’re written down. But she has properly committed to some things here.

She’s looked at the way that AI has produced lyrics in the past, and noticed that there are bits in brackets, which represent ad-libs or shouts or harmonies. And she’s actually locked in some “oohs” and some “aahs” and some repeating words along the way.

I am really quite worried that this is not going to be good.

But it turns out my daughter knows a hell of a lot more about writing lyrics than I do because she absolutely nailed it.

Isn’t that good? My daughter wrote all of those lyrics! No AI involved.

Fair enough, it set them to music, but those are her words. And I think the two of them working in tandem have produced a massive banger!

In fact, there are some very famous songwriting duos in which one person writes the lyrics and the other sets them to music. Famously, Bernie Taupin would write song lyrics and then post them to his friend Elton John, who would come up with a tune. Now, I could never understand how that could work. Surely the writing of melody and the writing of lyrics would have to go in tandem, and as you change one, you’d have to change the other as well. And I’m sure a lot of songwriting does happen that way, but Rich in Red has shown me that a great tune does exist for most lyrics.

Pretty soon I started to get cocky. I’d decided that I could write lyrics too. And inspired by my daughter’s love of animals, I had the following genius idea:

The band is A.I., I thought, so why don’t they sing about how being human, being wild, having emotion is better than cold computer logic?

And because I think I am incredibly clever, let’s call the song A.I. - Animal Intelligence.

This is another example of how you really can riff with a large language model: I had some ideas for the lyrics, but not a complete song, so I described those ideas in text and then I let the AI fill in the gaps.

I instructed it to create a song where each verse ended with a specific line: “Your intelligence needs to be more…animal”.

And then I asked the AI to make the previous line rhyme with that. What vision, Spen!

I also described the vibe: This should be sung by girls who are fed up being teased by the cooler crowd.

This song took many, many goes through the AI before I got something that I liked. The main problem, I think, was after generating quite a few banging rock numbers by this point, everything it was spitting out was starting to sound very similar, and I did find myself wondering if the AI only had a very limited repertoire of chords and sounds for any given style of music.

As we discussed in my recent AI masterclass, I felt I was stumbling around in the dark, trying slightly different prompts in case one came up with the goods. And after 20 attempts, it finally did.

Yeah, A.I. is another standard rock anthem, but again, it’s added little tweaks and ad-libs that really do elevate it. Have a listen to the point where the drums just drop out for a beat, or the interesting phasing of the vocals.

Look, I am not a musician. I’ve never claimed to be. But when the AI adds these little additions, these flanges, these improvs, it really does make it sound more human.

No.

More animal.

Now, I’m not going to deny that AI music has been really, really divisive. As you can tell, I love playing with it and I think it’s amazing how just maths can create things that look and sound so human. But there are plenty of people out there who don’t want anything to do with this.

“It’s not art,” they say. “Computers can’t make art. In order to make art, you need to have had life experience. You need to put emotion into your work. You can tell what an artist was thinking and feeling, and you can feel the pain that went into that work. And AI doesn’t feel.”

So, here’s a quick story.

Many years ago, I went to a local art exhibition. There were some really weird works of art there, including one painting which I can only describe as a massive childish line drawing of a face with lots of seemingly random words scribbled all around it.

I didn’t take a photo of it, but from memory, it looked a bit like this:

Lots of people were admiring it, stroking their chins and saying, “Oh yes, very, very complex, very enigmatic. Yes, I can see the anguish, I can see the anger here.”

It wasn’t to my taste, but I did find myself wondering what those words meant. What was the artist feeling? Was she compressing a terrible incident into one image?

Well, it turned out that the artist was actually there, so for once I had the opportunity to ask her. I said, “These words look really complex, really deep. What made you choose these particular words to put on this mysterious work of art?”

And she replied: “I dunno, they’re just random words I thought of at the time.”

Great.

I’ve done enough self-improvement courses to know that if you don’t know a person, you cannot read anything into their behavior, let alone their work of art. Anything you think you can see is all your stuff. Whether it’s someone in front of you who you think is being a right a**hole, or an artist whose million-dollar painting you’re looking at right now - if it makes you emotional, it is all to do with you.

And you know, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. And a great artist will build in things that they know will trigger many people. But you have no idea what the artist was feeling.

Case in point…

One of the songs that I created with my daughter for this album is called Five-Sided Heart. It’s a song about friendship and about being there for each other. And the second verse is about how one of the group was having a bad time and everyone else looked after her.

Now, someone in my life, someone really important to me, finds life quite overwhelming. They get really disturbed by loud noises, and noisy environments can really upset them. I think they’ve been really brave in coping in situations where most of us would be fine, but to them, it’s just, it’s really scary. And the second verse of Five-Sided Heart, well, it just, it hit me really hard.

CLAWS - Five-Sided Heart on Spotify / Apple / YouTube / Amazon

To me, that means so much. It’s like the song is written about this person who I know and love. It speaks to me because I know how hard the world is for this person sometimes. But it was just generated by a computer.

So you tell me that AI can’t trigger people’s emotions.

Oh, one brilliantly weird thing about this song, though, it did have a little “AI moment” (a bit like a senior moment). For some reason, it misinterpreted a song instruction as a lyric. The final part of the song construction says that “the song ends with a final ringing guitar chord that fades out”.

Not only did it decide not to follow these instructions, but to sing them, But it also completely mangled the vocals them for no reason that I can determine. I decided to leave it on the recording, just as a little secret AI quirk.

Christmas 2025 rolls around and I say on social media that a lot of the lyrics in this year’s crop of Christmas singles seem like they’re straight out of a rubbish AI.

And then I realize I’d better put my money where my mouth is and see if I can do any better. So I asked AI for lyrics for a CLAWS Christmas hit.

Again, I fed in information about the different characters in the band, and I think it came up with something that’s far cleverer than some of the human-written Christmas clichés out there.

I asked for Christmas instruments, I asked for a Christmas chord structure, and I’ve got to say, it came up with something that I think flattens everything else within a 50-mile radius.

It has energy, all the Christmas feels, and bells!I love the bad-girl rock vibe in the lyrics, too: Lydia’s spiking the eggnog, getting up to no good, Westa’s tuning her guitar, rocking the neighborhood. And then there’s the rock ‘n’ roll sleigh that clatters onto the roof…

By the way, I wanted to change a couple of the lyrics after this song had popped out of the AI.

That is a nightmare.

In theory, you can get it to re-sing individual words and keep the tune, but in practice, it mangled it every time! So this song is actually a stitch-together of all the bits that I could rescue. Just in time for Christmas!

Okay, it’s high time I addressed the elephant in the room.

For generative AI to be able to do this remarkable stuff, it’s had to absorb an awful lot of training data. And that means it’s listened to all the songs available online.

Obviously, human musicians do not like this: They say AI has stolen their work. It’s copied it into its training database without their consent.

Now, that is a legal argument that may yet hold water, but I don’t think it’s the argument that artists really want to make. What they really want to say is, “Hey, this is not fair! Something that we thought only humans could do is now being done really well by machines.”

My views on this are not going to go down well with anyone who wants to earn a living in the arts, but - here goes:

All musicians have been inspired by other musicians throughout history. New artists, established artists, and even the true greats will all surely say that their work was inspired by the stuff that they grew up listening to.

And really, that’s all AI is doing: It’s listened to a lot of stuff, and it’s making new stuff based on what it’s heard.

But the thing is, it’s been able to listen to so much more music than any one human could in their lifetime. And, of course, AI is able to generate much more music than any human could too.

According to just one music streaming site, Deezer, 50,000 AI-generated songs are being uploaded every day. That’s a third of all music that’s being uploaded to its site. We are drowning in AI songs and many of them are mediocre.

I might be biased, of course, but I think CLAWS is a cut above. But that’s just me.

So what does all this tell us? What has my experience been?

Admittedly, I have very shallow music tastes, but I think CLAWS have produced some bangers. But I acknowledge they are formulaic.

AI needs to train on a lot of data. That means it can copy very popular, traditional styles very well, but it’ll never be able to imitate brand-new styles.

You’ll always have top artists who try new things and new production styles. If it’s new, if there’s not a lot of it out there for AI to swallow up, then AI won’t be able to mimic it.

But a lot of musicians who’ve been making middling, formulaic songs, filler album tracks, and even those four-chord guaranteed hits - well, AI can do that now.

The musicians who are going to be successful will need to be original and innovative, and also have a connection with their fans. Fans will want to know their story. They’ll want to see them perform live too.

Honestly, I don’t know where this is all going, but as for the question “Can computers do art?” and “What is art?”, I have this to say:

I have loved creating this album with my daughter. I love the songs. My daughter loves performing the songs in my living room! But most of all, I love that this has brought the two of us closer together.

And if you are at all worried about whether computers are stealing art from us, well, for what it’s worth, this is my definition of art…

Art is something that the artist does for themself - not for profit.

You do it for your own satisfaction.

If other people like it, that’s great, but if you go into art to make money…well, unless you are excellent, I’m afraid that’s been automated.

But if you make stuff, and the process of making it is the thing that brings you pleasure? That’s my definition of art.

And that is something that computers can never take away from us.