THEA: Another one of Chad’s great ideas. There are some beautiful metaphors here.

“And though they may be warm enough that we still won’t let go” is the most significant lyric change I personally made; most everything else was a cosmetic change to Chad’s ideas: a better word here, a better rhythmic phrase there, and at the end a minor-but-necessary direction change where the singer is not just describing what’s happening, but expressing his personal desperation.

During our process on this song (which took over 200 Suno generations), Chad said to me, “I wish people understood how hard this is.”

And that is one of my motivations for writing all these summaries of what we do.

There is a remarkable amount of debate that goes on regarding the use of tools like Suno to make music. I am aware there are people who just churn out stuff with sloppy prompts and nonsensical AI-generated lyrics, and distribute it to streaming services in an effort to make easy money.

That has very little resemblance to what we’re doing. But it’s also not our goal. We’re actually writing, and we’re doing it for human performers…so we really work hard to get the tunes right. Suno might give us the perfect take with everything we want and then we’ll hear some odd machine blemish, a strange note in the bass line, an extra bar, or some errant chord that only happens once. In this case, many of the takes were good except for one thing…but the reason we finally felt good about this one is that there were no structural problems, and coming out of the bridge, the desperation in the vocal track was what we’d been looking for.

So there’s a little behind-the-scenes look at the effort we make on every song.