I pulled a few royalty-free loops together in my home studio software. I then came up with an idea for the lyrics and asked ChatGPT to generate something from the idea. It’s offering was awful, but one or two words it mentioned gave me some inspiration.
Over the course of a morning, I pulled together a complete lyric and ad libbed a melody over the track I’d built. With the loops, it started out as a kind of accidental Meat Loaf pastiche, but gradually morphed into something sounding a bit more like what we might call The Runaway Stones but with your man Elton rocking on piano…as I replaced the guitar and bass loops with my own rhythm and lead guitar parts played on my Tele and a new bass line on my Yamaha bass. The song was thus a hybrid of live guitar, bass, and vocals, but with some nice drum and piano loops in my studio software.
The lyrics seemed to be about somebody always on the run, but also in need of constant validation and desperate to make it. They’re not autobiographical, honestly. With such lyrics, the vocal needed a bit more grit and gravel than I can muster with my voice having never been a smoker, so I had a look around for some novel processing plugins and found a nice AI app that offered to take your clean, dry (no effects or processing) vocal and make it sound like someone else singing. I opted for a character the system offered called Blake, who in the faux photo they assigned to those settings was long-haired, swarthy, and looked just like the character in my song.
I ran my vocal through the system and downloaded the output. It sounded very authentic, like the country rock singer I could never be. I pulled the track into the mix. I kept my original vocal with my voice, but used the Blake track to double my vocal at a lower level and panned slightly across the stereo field. So, it’s all the same notes and nuance as I’d sung, but with this country rock voice underpinning my lead vocal, at a lower volume and with a bit of EQ. The result is like having an American brother from another mother singing alongside me. Blake is probably about a fifth of the vocal sound you hear but without him, my voice sounds more Phil Collins than Billy Rae Cyrus.
Fake it till you make it
You’ve been living on the wrong side of town,
Where the whispers and the shadows meet,
They say the law’s been asking around,
But you’re faster on your feet…
With a restless heart and a guilty mind,
You packed up what you should,
Told your girl you’d be hard to find,
You’d stay if you only could
Run it, gun it, break with the news
I’m the mover whatever I choose
Fake it, take it, shake off the blues
I’ve got to make it or I lose
The highway stretches dusk to the dawn,
Driving through your deepest fears,
‘cross every mile, you’re leaving no mark,
But you just can’t outrun the years
In every town, there’s a story that’s told,
Of the loner who had to pay,
But you’re not about to fit that mould,
You’re shooting through, you’re never going to stay
Hum it, pun it, break from the booze
I’m a faker when I’m about to lose
Shake it, oh flake it, go fuck the muse
I’ve got to take it or I lose