Episode 17 –  “Don’t ask me the story, it’s your job to make up the rest.”

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

Welcome back for episode 17 of Songs That Don’t Suck. My name is Mark, I am your host and oh boy, I have been dying to record this and talk about what happened this past week.

So the shit really hit the fan this week, 250,000 plays of a collaboration between Drake and the Weeknd that was AI generated and 100% fake. The lyrics were real, the music was real, but the voices were mimicked as an AI fake. Rihanna also got the fake AI treatment this week, but the Drake weekend thing really blew up. It sent the Universal Music Group into a whirlwind of cease and desist letters and legal threats against online streaming platforms and social media platforms where these tracks started to spread like wildfire, as you would assume they would. Now that the music industry has taken notice, I hate to tell them they’re partially to blame for this. With the amount of computer generated nonsense, it was only a matter of time before this happened.

The scariest thing of all, there’s no legislation or protection in sight. There’s no legal precedent to stand on around mimicry. So things are about to get really interesting and really expensive from a legal standpoint for the music industry. And what does that say? Can you copyright your own voice? It’s going to be really, really interesting to see what happens. Like it just makes me think about, okay, what’s next? How soon before we get a nondescript AI voice that is really nice to listen to and a roomful of pop garbage songwriters, you can literally crank out short lifespan hits forever based on the current trendy algorithm.

I’ve seen people go to DJs, like for live shows, which I just think is ridiculous. So I could completely see a staged light and video show of these fake AI pop smashes and people paying actual money to go listen. It’s asinine, but I can see it happening. It will not shock me. And pop honestly is easy to mass produce in this world.

When I was first reading about this whole kerfuffle, I opened my phone and I searched for AI Music Generator and I could literally create tracks on my phone and record the vocals. Tie in the AI voice and all of a sudden everybody is Drake, making no one Drake. And it won’t stop at pop. No musician is safe from this crap. In more disheartening news around AI, there have been attempts to create music from artists who have passed away. Now this flew under my radar, but as I was kind of researching this whole thing, there were two organizations that were focused on mental health in the music industry and they put together the lost tapes of the 27 Club. So artists like Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse and Jim Morrison of the Doors and Kurt Cobain and they fed their music into an AI model to train it and they produced tracks based on their styles.

The songs are gone from Spotify, but I did manage to find them on YouTube and while their mission is admirable, I think supporting mental health for any industry is important. This honestly really disgusted me. I had no words to describe how I was feeling as I was listening to it other than it just bothered me like in my core.

All of this led me to believe that the only true artistry left will be in small clubs where rock bands will continue to exist. So if you love music, now is the time to get out and support local and regional bands because the local and regional bands of today are the giant bands of tomorrow. And if you don’t, your fate is a musical matrix.

At the same time, it makes me wonder, will all of this really discourage young people from actually picking up instruments and learning how to play music? Will it force them to not need to learn music theory and will they not express their creativity writing their own lyrics? As schools continue to cut funding for arts education, you start to wonder what the point is if computers are taking away the creativity side of things. I personally thought technology was supposed to replace the drudgery of life, not the joys like art and music. The whole shift in paradigm is disturbing on so many levels, but I will be interested to see what comes next and honestly how fast it comes. Alright, let’s get into some music.

This week’s Brain Bending Cover comes from Cigarettes After Sex and it’s a cover of a Brooks and Dunn song called Neon Moon. When I was in college, I went through a very deep and significant country music phase. Every Wednesday was college ID night at the Boot Scootin’ Saloon. I legit am not making that up. That was the name of the bar. It was in Cuyahoga Falls and I would be there in the cowboy hat and the boots and the giant buckle and it was a beer soaked dance all night good time. Now Neon Moon was one of those songs that we heard every week and I have a lot of memories attached to that particular song. So when I caught this cover, it just I was like, oh, I have to do this. Now when Brooks and Dunn sing it, there’s a sadness in the song, but honestly, it sounds like at times that they’re kind of happy to be under the Neon Moon at the bar drinking away the memory, but this version of it is just sad. Like I really love the change of the feel of it and the lyrics almost take on this dark, like just just a very, very dark is the only way to describe it. But it just really kind of changed the delivery of the lyrics, which I thought was so good. So I hope you enjoy that one when you give it a listen.

All right, let’s get into the new music for this week. This is episode 17. If you don’t know how this works by now, here is the 50,000 foot view. I listened to a bunch of music. Most of it is crap. I listened to it for about 30 seconds. If I like it, I put it on a playlist or review it and I share it here with you best of the best, right?

Right. This week is all about rock and we are going to start with some folk rock. The first song this week comes from Joy Oladokun and it is called Taking Things for Granted. There is no other artist that I have talked about more on this podcast than Joy. This is I think the third time that I’ve talked about her and I swear every time that I have talked about her, it’s basically me saying how I like this song better than the last one I heard. The first song was called Changes and then a couple of weeks ago I did the duet that she did with Noah Kahan called We’re All Gonna Die and now Taking Things for Granted. The cool thing is that each song has been very, very different. I love the folk rock feel of this. There are some really cool things happening on the background vocals. There is like this really cool effect and it matches what the lyrics are talking about. So the lyrics are talking about her being in a swimming pool and either being in it or being underwater or drowning or not getting out of it or looking at the surface of the water. There’s a lot of water references and if you listen to the background vocals, they’ve applied this effect that makes the vocal sound like it’s being underwater. So like I don’t remember if you were a kid and you would go underwater and try to talk to your friends underwater, it kind of sounds like that to me, which I thought was a fun little detail. Now third song in at this point I cannot wait for this album to come out because so far every track is exceeding the expectations set by the last and that is always a good place to be in as an artist.

The second song this week comes from Shambolics and it’s called Never Gonna Change. Shambolics are from Scotland and there’s a bit of that Scottish brogue you can actually hear in the vocal delivery, which I personally enjoy. There is a bit of Oasis influence on this track, I think, but they’ve definitely got their own sound and vibe. I wanted to kind of check it out to see if they were, you know, heavily influenced by Oasis or at least by my ear. And I gave a few tracks, a listen from this EP called U Serious Boi?!?, and it’s very different. It’s very solid. There’s a lot of influences going on, like I think I heard some 80s pop influence maybe at some points in kind of the orchestration, but overall it’s really, really good. And if you like this track, I think you should go check out the other ones for sure.

The third track this week comes from Backroad Smokers Club and it’s called Cleopatra. This band just sounds like a good time. There are five core members of this band. They’re from Ireland. But apparently at any given moment the band will swell up to 12 members, maybe more. They’ve got a horn section, they do collaborations with other artists. It just, I don’t know, sounds just like a good time. Like I’d want to go see this band live for sure. This track, I love it. I love the kind of the bounce to it. It’s just fun. There’s some really cool rhythms happening between the drummer and the piano player. If you pay really close attention, you can probably catch it. It’s kind of in the hook, especially later in the song, it really pops out to me. And the drummer just does some really cool things overall. There’s some really cool modifications of the rhythm that he’s playing. And it’s kind of super fun to just, how much you can actually change a track when you make a subtle change to the things that you’re playing. This is musician nerd stuff and I apologize if I’m like rambling about stuff you don’t care about. But it’s one of those things that when I listen to music and I pick those things up as a musician, I just appreciate it. And I like to share that. So if you are the drummer of Backroad Smokers Club, you have a fan in me.

All right, a little bit of housekeeping as always. This is your standard weekly reminder. Please like, follow and share the podcast, review the podcast if the platform allows you to do that. Platforms like Good Pods allows you to do that. So if you are a podcast fan and you haven’t discovered Good Pods, check that one out. It’s really fun. Mondays is the full version that has the music. Wednesdays you get the Cliff Notes version. We have a website that you can visit. It is songsthatdon’tsuck. net. You can send me recommendations through forms that are on the website. You can find show transcripts. You can find links to all the places that you can hear the podcast. And you can find links to the social media sites. If you want to support the show, follow me on social media. Twitter is the main place that I like to play around. I do have a Facebook site and an Instagram site as well. On the website, there is also a merch section if you want to buy a t-shirt or stickers.

The fourth song this week comes from The Commoners and it is called Find a Better Way. When this song started as I was doing the review, I heard that Hammond B3 organ and I was all in. I was like, yep, I want to hear all of this. And as I listened to the song, it reminded me of when I first heard the black crows shake your moneymaker back when it came out when I was in high school. I loved that bluesy feel and it just, I don’t know, it felt really good. It’s all I can say. The really odd thing I found about this, because it is definitely whiskey-soaked Southern Rock kind of feel, but these guys are from Toronto, which awesome, I love it. But stuff like this, when I do these music reviews, sometimes the stuff that I have to wade through just depresses me because I’m like, this is what we’re considering music. But when I catch stuff like this, it gives me hope and I love it. And I hope that you do too.

The fifth song this week comes from a little-known band called Foo Fighters and it’s called Rescued. Okay, I know you know who the Foo Fighters are, but let me tell you that when my buddy sent me the news that this track hit, I yelled like I’m in my basement just yelling, good thing I was home alone. And when I actually listened to the track, I damn near fell out of my chair and I’m not exaggerating, like this song blew me away, partially because I love Dave Grohl as a human being and as a musician. I just have the utmost respect for not only the music he creates, but what he does for the music community and the things that he believes in. And when Taylor Hawking died, I was truly devastated. All as a musician because Taylor was a phenomenal drummer, but just devastated for Dave for not just having to go through that bullshit once, but twice. And I personally thought that in that moment that that might be the end of the Foo Fighters, like that felt like an obvious outcome because of Dave’s relationship with Taylor. We recently kind of marked a year since Taylor’s passing and having this album get announced and this single come out, I felt like it was such the right way to honor Taylor’s legacy and spirit because Taylor would want the Foo Fighters to continue. Those are his brothers and they are all so passionate about what they do. He would not want his passing to snuff out that passion. So a year later it makes perfect sense that this album is going to come out. Now I listen to this track a lot, probably more than I normally would listen to a song that I am putting on the podcast, simply for the fact that I’m a huge fan of the Foo Fighters and I just, this song was impressive, like I just loved it. But the one thing I did realize is it is absolutely Dave playing drums. There’s just some very obvious Dave girl things that he’s doing that when I first initially listened to it, I was like, oh, it’s not Dave. But then I was like, oh, no, wait, it is. It makes total sense that Dave’s playing drums, but it will be very interesting to see who actually sits on the drum throne when they start touring. And I will be there without a doubt. This song just, it’s freaking amazing. And I love the lyrics. I love the energy of it. And I cannot wait for this album to come out. It’s going to be by far my favorite album of 2023. I can feel that already. And if this song is any indication of what we can expect, it’s going to be incredible. That is the best way that I can end this podcast talking about Foo Fighters.

So with that, I hope you enjoyed this episode. It’s probably my favorite one in recent memory, just because of the music. It’s all rock and it’s all kind of the stuff that I love dearly. So I hope you loved it the same way that I did. I hope you found a couple of songs that you’re going to add to your playlists. And I will catch you next episode. Thanks for listening. And until next week, keep searching for and listening to songs that don’t suck.