Lynn Cole - Beautiful To Me - Lyric Video

Lynn Links:

Spotify: https://artists.spotify.com/c/artist/...
Bandcamp: https://holographicgf.bandcamp.com
Website: https://lynncole.art/pages/find-me
Alternate Youtube Channel:    / @priestessofdada  
Talk to me: @LynnCole on Discord.
Birdsite: @PriestessOfDada

Welcome to stoned story time with Lynn Cole. In this episode, we’ll talk about where this song came from, the process, and why it exists the way it does. If you’re new here, hi! I’m Lynn Cole, intrepid songwriter and experimental artist. Nice to meet you. I specialize in messing with AI’s and DAWS to create interesting songs from my hand-written lyrics. Never trust Megatron to write lyrics if you want anything good.

It’s funny I mention that because that’s where this song started. When Suno was known as Chirp and only available on Discord, I gave it long prompts involving song fragments I had in my head. The prompt that started this process was, “I’m happy that I got some, I only love you cuz you’re awesome. I found someone.” It built a whole song around it. Very cool. You can find a few drafts on my newly abandoned SoundCloud (long story, bad news for this music, nuff said).

I wasn’t fully satisfied with the first draft, but I liked the way the chorus flowed. Later, I went through maybe five different songs worth of lyrics before arriving at the verses in this one, which I came up with about two drafts ago. I felt it could be a really good, fun song, but the older chorus wasn’t holding the weight of the song anymore.

I’m a clip hoarder. I never throw a clip away, no matter how bad, because there’s always something I can use. A lyric, a vocal stem, a bass line, a drum beat. I reuse drums and fiddles a lot. This morning, I pulled some lyrics out of the pile, and it happened to be this one. I’ve been feeling love songs more lately, and the timing could be bad, but I decided to work on it anyway. Starting in Suno, I rendered the song a couple of times. Suno’s better at hooks and melodies than Udio is, so it’s where I start my process. Write some lyrics, throw them into Suno, and blend lightly!

One of these clips had an opener I loved. Then I pulled the song down, chopped and edited the opener, and realized how cheerful it was. Funny, because I had thought of this as a bittersweet needy love song. But doing a happy version of it sounded fantastic when I put it through that first draft on Udio with the Suno opener. It had problems. Udio never gets my lyrics right on the first try. I use a lot of variable iambic when I write, partially because it’s harder to sing, and partially because it’s fun to watch AIs hallucinate like crazy as they learn your song.

That’s when I realized the meter wasn’t working. I listened to the hallucinations. The cool thing about hallucinations is that the AI proposes a pattern it can understand and work with. I didn’t like any of them, but I noticed the machine kept trying to go back into the opener. So, I rewrote the chorus to fit the same beat, da da da, da da da da. The first render worked, but the machine wasn’t quite as responsive to it as I had hoped. I added a cheeky moment by changing the end of the second verse.

I experimented with it until I got something charming enough to work. In trying to figure out how to rhyme the thought, I used “awesomely sensible, sensibly magical,” because it’s paradoxical and made me giggle. Half the fun of working with AI is riffing on the performance as it goes. You see the computer do something, you respond, like you’re in the studio, playing off the energy of the room. Same basic idea, but without the social element. It feels flatter and less satisfying, but it is what it is, and it’s still fun!

Then I had my first render, which was really close but not quite right. I figured out the problem was I was accidentally doing voice transfer, taking some verse melody from Suno that I didn’t like. With adjustments and using less of the sample, I came up with something a lot weirder and much more fun.

I ran it all through the machine a second time with a couple of prompting variations and chord hacks and came up with this, which matched my creative vision for the song by the end. Then, per the usual, I tore the song apart, revised pieces manually, and mastered it in Reaper. I like Reaper.

In all, about 14 hours of process and revision work from start to finish on the present iteration. This is draft 19 and the 5th published version of this song. It’s the best, and I’m gonna leave it here, I think.

The video is a three-layer collage composed of old R&B television, two clips from a propaganda film, and a depth map I made from stock footage a while back. All looping over and over again, somehow magically looking just right. I love chaos, but I don’t always understand it.

I love you all.