‘theworldcanwait’

It’s said that the road to hell is paved with the skulls of rebels and renegades. This project is an act of rebellion. The creative process is something that takes place in a space akin to hallowed ground, understood by few, although home to many, but not the domain of algorithms, LLM’s, neural networks, tokens and processing that takes place in a multidimensional mathematical space.

I’ve been writing songs on and off since I was in my late teens. For the most part they just turn up, unasked, and often at the most inconvenient times. My muse is a harsh mistress, unrelenting and demanding. Somewhere in the late ’90’s I abandoned playing other peoples songs and focused exclusively on writing my own. Then came the flood. For about 6-7 years they just poured out of me, song after song, preserved either in charts and text or recorded on whatever was lying around.

So here we are, 2025, I’m still writing but there’s a huge backlog of songs that never got past being written. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that to clear that backlog I’m resorting to employing an AI assistant. ‘Good Lord’ I hear you say, on heavens earth, why?

Well, I had time on my hands that was meant to be spent pursuing the conventional road to deal with those stragglers. But I ran into a brick wall; literally.

A workplace accident saw me propelled headlong into a brick wall, knocked unconscious and fall to the pavement splitting both lips. Whilst in recovery and because I couldn’t sing, have no studio, no quiet space to record, etc,. the thought dropped into my head, ‘is there another way’? And lo and behold a quick internet search landed me on the homepage of SUNO.AI

What I didn’t want was software that would only allow me to to generate songs from scratch. Anathema. I can write my own and do a good job of it. I wanted to be able to upload my own recordings, punch in my own lyrics, tweak some settings and bingo, with patience and discrimination, be able to listen to those songs re-imagined / re-arranged; essentially, at the hands of an anonymous producer. The desired outcome of course is to generate something that maintains the spirit, and bears as close a likeness as possible to the original.

Addendum

‘theworldcanwait’ began as a project on Soundcloud in 2014 and has come to fruition in 2026 with the release of 7 albums and 9 EP’s on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music.

The songs / music in these Albums and EP’s are drawn from a period of writing that spans 46 years; which accounts for the diversity and something resembling a lack of stylistic cohesion not usually associated with album releases.

What’s been done in the last three months working with SUNO.Ai has saved me the equivalent of at least 3 years of studio time and somewhere between $150,000 – $200, 000 (based on a minimum of $20,000 per album).

Despite the backlash, I’m comfortable with the road taken for these songs to see the light of day. This process has been essentially for me. I have no interest, beyond being able to, at long last, listen to what the muse has delivered over the period of our long association.

As Andy Warhol once said, “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art”

There are those that have asked me “what do you want from this?” To which I more often than not reply, “just to be able to hear what’s in me”