Episode 87

Welcome to Songs That Don’t Suck with your host, Mark Bradbourne.

What’s up friends? Welcome to yet another episode of Songs That Don’t Suck. I am your host, Mark, and every week I’m here listening to hundreds and hundreds of newly released songs, finding a few that don’t suck. Then I get behind a microphone and I talk about them and I share them with you in the hopes that you don’t think they suck either. And we all expand our playlists with new music because there is great new music out there to be found. It just takes a hell of a lot of work. So I’m trying to make it a little bit easier. Hey, if this is your first time listening to the podcast, thank you so much for checking it out. If you’re a long time listener to the podcast, you’re amazing and I love you a bunch. Now, before we get into the new music, you know me, I got something to talk about.

AI will kill music, but the real question is, do we care? Sven Welt posed this question in a recent article he published on medium.com. And when I saw the title, I immediately got pissed off. I got baited so bad by this title that I had to click it. And I did and I read it and it was a fantastic article. It’s really thought-provoking. And I’m gonna pop a link to the article in the show notes so you can read it in full. But I do wanna kind of share some thoughts that I have and some highlights from that article. So let’s get into it. He starts with a simple idea.

We have 182 Beatles songs today. But what if we could have 3000 Beatles songs or 10,000 Beatles songs or more? AI has somewhat made this idea a plausible reality. But I had to pause after I read that part and question, would they actually be Beatles songs? The article continues making comparisons about how technology has come into our lives and it’s been demonized. It happened with the printing press, when we could mass produce books. Electricity was demonized. All of these things that pushed forward humanity were met with resistance because we as a species hate change. It’s hard for us because we’re afraid that we’re going to lose something from inside ourselves that we are attached to. And we don’t recognize that that change might be and generally is for the better. Now, he points out that AI is not a tool and I’m gonna get into that here in a little bit. We can use AI to expand our capabilities. But the one thing that AI cannot do is replicate the one defining human element that we all have, creativity.

So let’s get back to that Beatles idea and my question about would they actually be Beatles songs? If we trained a generative model on every Beatles song that has been released and then added in George Harrison’s solo work, John Lennon’s solo work, Paul’s work with Wings and his solo albums and Ringo’s solo work, we could get a reasonable facsimile of what a quote unquote new Beatles song would sound like, maybe. Now, as I’ve mentioned before in talking about AI, the way these models work is they attempt to complete the pattern and predict an idea of what would happen next based on what it’s been trained on.

The difference between AI and humans is that humans, the world around us affects us. It affects our ideas, it inspires us. We have interactions with other people, we listen to other music. All of this stimulus that we get imprints upon our creative psyche and LLMs cannot replicate that. And quite frankly, I don’t think they ever will because LLMs cannot exist in reality. Now, Sven flips this kind of on its head at this point and talks about how we are tools for AI and AI actually feeds off of humans and it feeds off of all of our art. Sven then kind of predicts that AI will not be the end of creativity so much, but it’s really the end of creative people. AI isn’t doing the thing we want it to do, which is take away menial tasks that we have to do, like folding clothes or washing dishes, but it’s really cheapening art, whether it’s visual art or audio art.

Sven points out that the musical industry actually has never successfully stopped technological advance and he’s right. Alan Cross covered this in one of his podcast episodes talking about how John Philip Sousa railed against recorded music saying it would put musicians out of business. And I believe he like went in front of Congress to talk about it. When radio came about and started playing music on the radio, the recorded music industry really freaked out thinking that people would stop buying records ’cause they could just hear it on the radio. But with each step of the way, the art has advanced, but at the same time, the pie that was income around music has been chipped away. Now in the days of streaming, we’re talking about fractional pennies per play. And that’s shared between potentially dozens of entities from the label to management to lawyers to accountants to songwriters. Go look at a pop record and see how many songwriters are on it. There could be a dozen or more. That list starts to get really deep and the money gets really, really thin. Now with AI, the pool of money has thinned even more as scammers are using AI to create music and dropping it on streaming platforms and they are filtering off millions in payments. Recently, a guy in New Jersey got busted. I think he got like $10 million in royalty payments from AI stuff that he had, quote unquote, created. And he’s going to jail, rightfully so. Now, I think that creative people will probably cease to create when there is no prospect for making a living. You will continue to see solo artists, but I think bands where it really takes a lot of effort to create something, you’re going to see less and less of it. So I think AI to me is killing real music because hiring producers and songwriters to create songs, I don’t know, I feel like it’s just cheap. Anyway, so then points out that eventually we could potentially see AI in everyone’s hands. So everyone has their own AI models. They can train it on the music that they like and they can create their own listening ecosystems. So the idea of the shared experience will be lost. No massive crowds cheering for their favorite artists when they play their favorite song. It’s just a single listener, listening to their own fake songs generated from models that were trained by the last of the creatives.

Now, I feel that millennials and Gen X care. We care about this because we remember a time when music was worth something. We would work our part-time jobs after school, babysitting, mowing lawns, whatever. We would save up our money to go buy music. We would buy an album or buy a single and we could physically hold that music in our hand. And while we listened to it, we built the connection as we would read the liner notes about who played on it and what the lyrics were. And when I think about younger generations who are coming into their music listening maturity during the age of streaming, the entire world of music is literally at their fingertips. The latest viral hit comes and goes within a week and then it’s forgotten about. There’s no connection to it. There’s nothing deeper than that fleeting moment. And I think that’s where the problem is. So this great article ends where it began. He asked the question, “AI will kill music, but do we care?” I’m here to say that I care. It’s why I’m here. It’s why I do this podcast every week. And it’s why I think you are here too. ‘Cause I think you, the listener, care. So let’s raise a glass to caring and let’s get into the new music for this week.

The first song this week is “Midnight to Vice” from the Bridge City Centers. This was a recommendation that was sent in by one of our listeners, Debra. In her message, she said that she saw the Bridge City Centers along with Bedouin Sound Clash as two of the openers for Frank Turner who she recently saw in concert. She said that it’s been a long time since she saw two openers that she liked in one show and I can attest that is a rare witnessing indeed. She describes them as dark folk or Southern Gothic. And I think that’s a really accurate description. The piano tone has this kind of classic ragtime sound. That almost tinny thing that happens. Ben Folds used to put tacks in one of his piano hammers so you could get that clangy sound. And then they’ve added in banjo and acoustic guitar and bass and then trumpet and trombone and clarinet. And then to tap this all off, they layer on some really sultry vocals. It’s almost vaudevillian. Like, I mean, however you describe it, it’s honestly really fantastic. I’m really glad that Debra sent this my way. If you’ve seen Hadestown, like the musical, I feel like this could be on the soundtrack and their entire album that this song comes off of is all like that. So here, check out a little taste of Midnight to Vice.

The second song this week is “Bills” from Lev UFO. When this first kicked in, I was like, “Is this some weird cover of “Space Lord” by Monster Magnet?” But it was not. It was this really cool mix of rock and alternative, a little bit of hip hop, and it kind of reminded me of early back. Really catchy hook, and I’m not sure of what the main instrument is. I don’t know if it’s a studio effect or if it’s an actual instrument, but to me, it sounds like this strange hybrid of a baritone acoustic guitar, maybe like a deep banjo. And if you’re familiar with the Russian balla-leica, like that big guitar that sometimes you see traditional Russian music, it feels like some of that too. But I don’t know, I don’t know if they make a bass version of that. All I know it’s cool, it’s unique, and I think it’s got a really killer groove. Not much else to say about it, so here, just give a quick listen to “Bills” by Lev UFO.

The third song this week is “Drugs Don’t Sway” from “The Castro’s.” If you like more poppy arctic monkey sounds, this might be something you’ll dig. The Castro’s are, I don’t know, it hit me weird. The guitar is what really brought the arctic monkeys to mind when I heard the opening, especially if I think back to, I think it’s their 2006 album, “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.” Like, I think you look good on the dance floor kind of stuff, that kind of like skanky guitar. It’s got a great feel, great melody, but like I said, it’s a little bit more poppy. And I really, really, really like the way they play with different feels between the different parts of the song structure. It just kind of keeps things interesting. I will say, and this is just nitpicking, that sometimes the vocal gets a little buried in the mix, especially when they’ve got some of these layered guitar things happening on. But like I said, it’s nitpicking. So anyway, check out “Drugs Don’t Sway” by “The Castro’s.”

The fourth song this week is “I’ll Be Over You” by Ash Ravens. More banjo! I don’t know, it seems like a theme this week, but “I’ll Be Over You” is kind of a folk rock jam, peppy rhythm, a lot of harmony vocals, and just an overall vibe, like it just feels really good. This is one of those tracks that when you hear it, if you’ve been to like a folk rock concert, that you know, really popular band, you can see the audience bouncing in time when the band just cranks this one out, and then there’s a point in the bridge where they slow it down, and everyone’s just singing at the top of their lungs, and then bam, right back into it. I really dig this style of folk rock, and I hope they don’t mind me calling it folk rock, ’cause honestly, that’s just what it sounds like to me. But I do find it harder and harder to find bands like this. It reminds me a little bit of “Carbon Leaf,” who I talked about a few episodes back. So here is a little taste of Ash Ravens and their song “I’ll Be Over You.”

The fifth song this week is “Pulling Teeth” by House of Protection, and I have a special guest to tell you all about it, since he’s the one that shared it with me. Please welcome to songs that don’t suck, Rico from the Rock and Roll Autopsy podcast.

Hey, thanks, Mark. That’s right, this is your Rock and Roll Beat Reporter. And even though Rock is dead, occasionally there’s some new music out there that kind of makes you think twice about that. And this is certainly one of those times. This song is such an interesting and cool musical mosaic from the spoken sections to the harmony in the chorus to the gigantic wall of sound guitars that they go on there. It doesn’t feel confusing. It’s well constructed, a nice cohesive unit there. The lyrics are well thought out. Clearly these guys have something to say and they do a good job of saying it. I love how the spoken sections to me feel just as intense as the screaming sections that have the same intensity as the chorus. I love how they did that. So go do yourselves a favor, hell do the band a favor and go listen to the song. Go listen to the whole EP while you’re at it. I really think you’re gonna like it.

Thanks, Rico. Here’s a little bit of pulling teeth.

And that is it for this week. Another episode in the bag. One step closer to the 2024 Don’t Suckie Awards. That’s right, at the end of this year, we’ll be doing the Don’t Suckies once again, and I’m looking forward to it. Hey, as always, you can follow the show on social media. Whatever the platform is, you’ll find us there. To find the songs, you’re gonna go to songsthatdontsuck.net. And there’s a little widget in the middle of the homepage there, where you can click and find links to the songs on all the major streaming platforms. Again, if you have the chance, please rate and review the podcast on your platform of choice. It means the world to me. Five stars is preferable, but hey, whatever you say, say it with your chest. And if you wanna send feedback to the show, you can always do that through songsthatdontsuck.net, or you can just email me directly at mark@songsthatdontsuck.net. All emails will be answered. Hey, thanks again for listening. And as always, go out and support these artists.

Thanks for listening, and until next week, keep searching for and listening to songs that don’t suck.